Winter Dreams: A Historical Guide to Old Age

One of The Daily Telegraph’s Greatest Books of 2025

A life-affirming exploration of the rich emotional lives of the elderly across thousands of years of human history.
 
Winter Dreams is an evocative history of the ways the old have thought, felt, and expressed themselves over two millennia, tracking the experience of aging through artistic, literary, and historical records. While old age is often depicted as “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans everything,” Barbara H. Rosenwein shows that the elderly have always retained their emotional depth and desires. She explores how these have changed over time, as societies’ views of the elderly and a “good” old age have changed. Through careful critique of these texts, she allows the elderly, so often absent from the historical record, to speak to us.
 
We live in a rapidly aging society, yet ageism is rampant and death and dying are taboo subjects. Rosenwein’s book is a finely wrought testimony to the value of aging and the richness of our “winter dreams.”