ABSTRACT
29It has been observed that contemporary divisions of the stages of life were predicated on the male body and life cycle as the norm, deploying traditional numerical divisions which were not necessarily coterminous with women’s lives and bodies. This organisation tended to universalise ageing from male experiences, significant milestones in men’s lives, and changes to male bodies. 1 Some studies of renaissance and early modern women have therefore moved away from this traditional division of life stages, relating ‘age norms for women, based on medical, legal, and social discourses’ to ‘the key social and legal markers in a woman’s life: namely, the phases of maidenhood, motherhood, and widowhood.’ 2 However, as many studies of widowhood have pointed out, this stage of life did not neatly align with older age for a woman. Even very young, newly married wives, potentially including those in their late teens and early twenties, might be widowed. 3 Widowhood was also something that a woman might experience more than once if she remarried as ‘Death and its disruptions formed a regular part of married life’. 4 In practice, then, widowhood was not necessarily the third and final stage of a woman’s life as the experience of loss of a marital – and hence sexual – partner was something that might occur at any age after marriage; and neither did all women marry nor all married women out-live a husband to experience widowhood. This division also assumes that maidenhood was the first stage of life from which a woman inevitably moved on to marry and produce children as this was the expected trajectory for the female life-course. In practice, up to 25 per cent of the female population never married in the seventeenth century, in some parts of Europe (for example, England), although some of these would have experienced motherhood as unmarried mothers, even if their infants did not survive or they were prevented by circumstances from being able themselves to raise their children.
