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The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England

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The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England
This is an important scholarly book and many academic historians will undoubtedly find it of great interest and have much to say about it. It deserves a wider readership as well, since its subject is broadly meaningful and since Keith Thomas is such a master of the material.

Thomas focuses on six "ends of life": military prowess, work, wealth, reputation, personal relationships, and the afterlife (leaving out others to keep it manageable). He examines these in England in the early modern period (1530-1780), assessing "ways in which those values were accepted, challenged, and reformed in response to the social and cultural developments of the time."

The book is thick with ideas and evidence, which may present a bit of a reading barrier, particularly for non-specialists. I turned randomly to a single page (p. 133) for an example to illustrate Thomas's approach and style. In those few paragraphs there appear three variations on a thematic idea, supported by about ten significant quotations or facts, drawn from three centuries. Extrapolating, one can see how forging through a few hundred similar pages requires athletic reading effort. Fortunately, the material is substantively compelling and Thomas writes clear declarative sentences.

Thomas makes a good case that the emergence of a market economy and other social and political changes helped open up "ends of life" choices for individuals and he shows how certain key values transformed. For instance, the ideal of military honor waned under the steady trend toward soldiering as a specialized occupation.

The notion that work could be a route to personal fulfillment had begun to overcome the obstacles of the Christian and classical traditions, which largely treated work as a tedious necessity. There was a growing acceptance of work not just as a means of subsistence, but also as a way to acquire a surplus to enable purchase of additional goods.

That marital love and raising children could be rewarding, formerly relatively novel ideas, came to be more widely accepted. For the first time conceptions of the afterlife stressed reunion of the nuclear family.

There is a common denominator across all of the "ends of life" Thomas discusses: people sought the esteem of others, whether it was to be won by courage, diligence, ostentation, conviviality, honesty, moral conformity, or whatever. "It is very likely that the desire to be valued by others is a human universal, to be found at all times in all places," Thomas says. "But that desire can take many cultural forms" and these forms underwent many mutations in the early modern period.

Thomas concludes that in early modern England, most people "cherished life for its own sake, not merely as a preliminary to some future state. Highly aware of the satisfactions which they could hope to find in their work and their possessions, the affection of their friends and families, and the respect of their peers, they increasingly sought fulfillment in their daily existence. Here, all around them, were the ends of life."

The various life goals described in this historical study are remarkably relevant to those alive in the 21st century. For example, the reputedly most prestigious way to be in the USA today is "busy", and therefore presumably important to others and doing important things, whether as workaholic or actively engaged with family, friends, causes, etc. Similar opinions existed in earlier times, causing some to die from overwork, and, more generally, people in Britain 500 years ago were little different in their life goals and purposes from us moderns, as author Keith Thomas demonstrates.

I found this book to be most illuminating and useful in framing my own ends before the inevitable end.

TFH