T his issue begins with a pair of articles that address two very different senses of time and chronological change during the long eighteenth century in Britain. Ted McCormick explores the relationship between long-term, deep histories of the creation of the earth and the multiplication of its many peoples, and the emergence of a new science of "political arithmetic" in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Amanda Vickery, in contrast, looks at time as lived experience, and at the gendered body in time.In "Political Arithmetic and Sacred History: Population Thought in the English Enlightenment, 1660-1750," McCormick argues for the importance of long-standing concerns about sacred history-the very longue durée history of the earth and humankind since its divine inception-to the shaping of the new and particularly English field of "political arithmetic." While the development of a science of political arithmetic, based on the importance of quantification and the emerging science of probability, was key to innovative thinking and novel questions about the relationship between state and society, McCormick insists that it must equally be seen as a response to ongoing debates about the ancient past and the accuracy of sacred histories based upon scripture. 1 While political arithmeticians struggled with determining how to fit the age of the earth into their understanding of human populations, others struggled with how to fit their personal experience of aging within their own cultural expectations. In "Mutton Dressed as Lamb? Fashioning Age in Georgian England," Vickery argues that the eighteenth-century concept of aging, particularly for women, had little room for a middle ground, or at least a middle age, between youth and "old age." She pays particular attention to the relationships among femininity, age, and fashion, and notes that anxieties about the fashion choices of middle-aged and elderly women were intense. Debates provoked by such anxieties often revealed a vicious streak of cultural misogyny. This tendency to criticize women's fashionability, however, was contradicted by "the equally insistent demands of rank, politeness, and respectability" (868). As Vickery also highlights, there was a consistent discrepancy between the general misogynist frames in which female appearance was discussed publicly in the eighteenth century and the rather more nuanced understandings of age and fashion that were expressed by women themselves in their own words. Both McCormick and Vickery, therefore, astutely attend to the ways in which 1