The Ages of Women and Men: Life Cycles, Family and Investment in the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries

Recent literature has suggested how late-medieval families may have used financial markets to navigate the life cycle. Precious little is known about the precise connections between the life cycle and family on the one hand and investments in financial instruments on the other, though. We analyse late-medieval investment behaviour using a new dataset of hundreds of life annuities. Our data give ages at purchase of annuitants as well as the pairings of investors in joint and survivor annuities and thus they allow us to link life-cycle events and family relationships to participation in financial markets. We demonstrate that the late-medieval public did not purchase single life annuities for children and argue this points to contemporaries having preferences other than for maximizing profits. We find that women were prominent investors in life annuities, but they also showed a preference for joint and survivor annuities, which were less profitable but provided insurance for (junior) family members. Finally, although the majority of joint and survivor annuities were purchased by family members, a substantial number were for people who appear not to have been related: we suggest godparenthood may help explain pairings of apparently unrelated adults and children

Seeking Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Father : Pieter Bruegel the Eldest (†1566), Pensioner in Sint-Janshuis Retirement Home, Bergen op Zoom

In 1553-1554, one Pieter Bruegel retired to Sint-Janshuis, Bergen op Zoom: a home where former servants of the Marquises of Bergen could spend their old age. The main argument of the article is that this retiree, who was the former barber-surgeon of Marquis Jan IV (1541-1567), should be considered as the father of the painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The latter’s origins are almost completely unknown, yet heavily debated: was he the son of a peasant who painted scenes of life in the countryside, or was he born and raised in an urban environment and did he satirise peasants in his artistic work? An historical reconstruction of the background of the retired barber-surgeon, and the retirement home he spent his final years in, shows he is a strong candidate for having fathered the famous painter. Evidence from the discipline of art history provides further support for the claim that the painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder was the son of a barber-surgeon and came from an urban social-middling-group background with close ties to one of the most important courts and artistic milieus in the Low Countries, the Renaissance palace Markiezenhof in Bergen op Zoom

Pap en brood tijdens de oude dag. Gepensioneerden in Amsterdamaan het einde van de middeleeuwen

This paper provides an analysis of 67 corrody contracts from 1476-1538. By purchasing such a contract, the elderly acquired lifelong lodging and care in an institution - in this case the hospital of Sint-Pieter in Amsterdam. Most customers paid in kind, by handing over real estate and financial instruments to the hospital, or promising to do manual labour. Customers spent the equivalent of 250-400 day's wages of a skilled labourer: late-medieval retirement was relatively inexpensive and this brought corrodies within reach of middling groups. This result is discussed in terms of the decline of family ties in the late Middle Ages: the rise of retirement homes was a reaction to changing social structures in the late-medieval Low Countries. Hospitals providing relatively inexpensive pensions - such as Sint-Pieter - were of crucial importance for those individual looking for a dignified old age, but unable or unwilling to turn to family and friends