Abstract

How were the elderly involved in daily conventual life in the late medieval period? This paper proposes to address the requests of forty elderly and sick supplicants to the Apostolic Penitentiary from 1438 to 1471, to shed light on the life experiences of the elderly in regular life. These monks and nuns, abbots and abbesses, were considered “uselessµ to administer their monastery or to participate in community life, which was regulated by a rule of life that was often strict and difficult to follow for an elderly person. They asked to be able to benefit from particular arrangements in terms of hygiene, food, ceremonies, or clothing, adapted to their religious life. All these requests testify to the desire of these forty elderly people to continue (or not) to live in a monastic community subject to a fence and to rules of life more or less relaxed for them, so that they can take advantage of the “careµ, in the medical as well as social sense, that these places and ways of life had to offer