Winter Dreams

In this fascinating history of the elderly, Rosenwein returns to the classical world to explore how Cicero, Euripides and Sophocles presented the winter of our lives – which, it transpires, was with rather more fullness and humanity than people show today. * Daily Telegraph: Greatest Books of 2025 *
A richly detailed study of attitudes to older people through history . . . From an impressive range of sources, Rosenwein traces changing and continuing experiences, expectations and tensions, along with negative and positive perceptions of old age. -- Pat Thane * BBC History Magazine *
In her fascinating history of old age, Barbara H. Rosenwein extracts lessons on ageing from Sophocles to Jenny Joseph . . . she hurtles through two millennia to chronicle how society feels about the aged – and how they feel about themselves . . . Winter Dreams is a satisfying meal of a book and I learnt a great deal. * Daily Telegraph *
This is a great idea for a book: an exploration of how people and thought and felt about old age across two thousand years of recorded history. It’s a rich and profound subject, and Rosenwein – a historian of emotions – surely has a vast range of material to call upon across both literary and historical records and writings. -- Mathew Lyons * The Broken Compass *
This book draws upon an impressive range of sources to show that, contrary to a common belief, people have grown old in every known society and, challenging the stereotype of old age uniformity, that their lives have always been highly diverse. A valuable deepening of our knowledge of an important, fast-growing demographic group. * Professor Pat Thane, Birkbeck College London *
An extraordinarily rich book for historians and all those interested in understanding the dreams (and nightmares) of old age. * Javier Moscoso, author of The Arc of Feeling *
There is great comfort to be had in knowing that our dreams of old age bear the history of our ancestor's dreams as well as the new possibilities of the modern age. Barbara Rosenwein's brilliant survey teaches us that we are not alone in how we might imagine life in its closing chapters. * Thomas Laqueur *