pre-modern ways of describing stages of life

Layla, how are you defining the modern period? Do you mean the period before the 15th century? What class of folks in what culture?

You'll get a lot more valuable answers if you can be more specific.

Layla Nahar said:

Hi -

Does anybody have an idea how people spoke about age before the modern period? (Or any ideas what I could research to find out more about that?)

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What people?

Where?

When?

In what language?

sometimes reckoning (the term probably most useful in a search) was by a catastrophic ("I was born in the second year of the drought") or regnal reckoning ("I was born in the third year of the reign of Caeser Augustus" or whatever) Some cultures have general age groups that you belong to: Child, newly reproductive, parent, old, and you're only counted as a part of the large group.

Is that more of the sort of thing you're looking for?

Like - would a person look at somebody and think: 'She was a newly reproductive woman' ?

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They'd probably call her a "youth" around the period of adolescence (as opposed to a child or a baby.)

There's actually a medieval legal process - the "proof of age" - in which people testified as to how old someone else was, usually in the context of that person attaining their majority and some sort of inheritance. A lot of age-reckoning was associational - i.e., "I know that John the Younger is now of age because he was born the same winter my favorite horse died, right before Christmas."