Being old is not the same as feeling old. It certainly makes sense to maintain a sharp distinction of both: “young” people may already feel old, “old” people, even “old old” people, that is old people having difficulties in taking care of themselves, may feel young at heart. Taking this observation as its starting point, Winter Dreams raises two fundamental questions. 1) what does it mean to “feel old”, more precisely what are the feelings, thoughts, experiences and dreams (here the umbrella term of the old age experience)? This is not an easy question, since having access to other people’s minds is already a complex endeavor, whereas having access to old people’s minds seems often out of reach. Old people “live in the past”, they may suffer from dementia, they are not always capable of expressing their own experience, their memoires mix fiction and reality, etc. 2) How can we properly analyze what old people dream of? Which are the sources, documents or testimonies we can rely on? To what extent are these records complete, representative, or reliable? Whose documents are we actually analyzing: history mainly transmits the voices of rich and fortunate people, but what about other groups and categories, like women or the poor? How to avoid sweeping generalizations? What to do with historical misrepresentations due to, for example, misogyny or patriarchalism? The author of this book shies away from simple answers just as she also refuses any form of presentism: this book is not about correcting or debunking ideas and feelings that we may be uncomfortable with today, it is a serious and inspiring attempt to reconstruct a longue durée history of mankind’s winter dreams.

A specialist of the history of mentalities, with important publications on medieval France or the history of anger but also on the theory and methodology of her field, the author offers a very original approach of an understudied aspect of the history of mentalities. Readers may be surprised by the absence of direct references to the French Annales school (Philippe Ariès or Alain Corbin, to name just a few specialists of the history of “private life”), but that does not mean that the methodological grounding of the book is not robust. The choices made by the author, who has really managed in writing a book that will be of interest to both the specialized and the general reader, are sound as well as refreshing. First, Rosenwein’s case studies offer an extremely broad perspective on the transformations of the winter dreams. The historical scope of the study ranges from Homer to contemporary elderly homes, thus mixing a great variety of periods and cultures (mainly Western, but Rosenwein rightly pays a lot of attention to Confucianist philosophy and politics). Second, the historical records or traces used by the author give priority to a special kind of sources, namely art. In the tradition of Raymond Williams’s ideas on the “structures of feelings” of a culture, as first elaborated in The Long Revolution, Rosenwein strongly relies on properly artistic expressions, both literary and pictorial. Williams’s book is not quoted, but one feels there is a clear family resemblance. Of course, Winter Dreams does not follow Williams’s Marxist line of thinking, the book does not frame the idea of “change” in a political or dialectical way, although on every page it makes very clear how much the personal is also the political and vice versa. Moreover, most of the artistic sources analyzed in Winter Dreams belong to the traditional canon, a methodological stance that may be at odds with the foregrounding of the popular and the vernacular in cultural studies. Yet Rosenwein’s focus on the canon is beyond any doubt a very strong and uplifting point of her book, for it also demonstrates the endless openness of now often overlooked (for reasons of “literary ageism?”) canonical works to new readings. In this case, the analysis of the old age experience through Homer, Cicero, Petrarch, and the like is at the same time highly stimulating and perfectly compatible with the more modern ambition to give a voice to the voiceless, since this is what Rosenwein is also doing in her reading of the classics.

For this is what is really at stake in Winter Dreams: reading experiences. What old people think often remains a mystery, certainly but not exclusively when we think of old age and aging in the past. In her analysis, which can be enjoyed as a wonderful anthology of the great texts on this theme, Rosenwein follows a certain number of methodological and theoretical principles that help solve this mystery. Let me stress here four of them.

One: While sharply disclosing the sometimes radical shift from one period to another, each of them structured around what Raymond Williams would have called a “dominating” structure of feeling, Rosenwein never loses sight of certain transhistorical features like filial piety or the fear of bodily and mental decay, which are always mixed with these historical dominants and circumstances. She thus carefully describes these “eternal” and “universal” characteristics with local or glocal shifts via five major and of course partially overlapping historical dominants: “enjoyment” in classic Greek culture, “acceptance” in Roman culture, “reciprocity” in medieval Christian culture where one “gives” something to old people (charity, that is money, time, care) in order to “receive” something in exchange (remission of sins and eternal paradise), “work”, that is the idea that old people only count when they are still capable of participating in productive work and making money (a question on which John Locke has many and problematic things to say) and “dignity” in more contemporary societies.

Two: This very nuanced approach is then finetuned by the comparison between the “dominant” and the either “residual” or “emergent” structures of feeling. In each new period, the influence of older perceptions is still there, while the debates in the present also foreshadow the irruption of newer questions (which may of course prove a down-spiraling return to older ones).

Three: Rosenwein equally emphasizes the permanent tension between the historical dominants and their actual application: filial piety, for instance, may have been institutionally, legally, ethically, and economically imposed at a certain moment in time and space, but that constraint is not necessarily respected: The younger have always resisted to this kind of rule, and Rosenwein does not ignore that history of resistance.

Four: The author always adopts the typically humanist stance of interpreting her materials, rather than relying on the more social sciences oriented attempt to empirical documentation. Rosenwein distrusts the conclusions drawn from experiments in sleep laboratories, she has doubts on the techniques of information gathering in surveys and interviews, she never takes testimonies and personal expressions at face value, she does not discard fictional sources as less valuable or inspiring than material or “objective” data (a point that she has in common with some newer forms of historiography), she even takes seriously the productive role of cultural stereotypes, which she does not consider antagonistic to personal and subjective feelings (also a very refreshing point of view, in a time where stereotypes are almost automatically linked with the idea of fake or false consciousness). Granted, Rosenwein remains faithful to history of mentalities ambition to rasp the feeling of communities, not just of individuals, but the way in which she manages to build bridges between the idiosyncratic expressions of a highly canonical work and the more general and sometimes slightly different tendencies of a certain era, is admirable.

A book on winter dreams, but for readers of all seasons, who will find here an awesome panorama with an underlying message that is finally positive and hopeful, but not in any naïve sense. Rosenwein does not dissimulate how individuals, groups, communities, and whole societies struggle with aging and old age, but she also highlights the manifold answers given to what should not only be seen as a cruel and finally unbearable issue.