Sin and Fear (13th-18th centuries) - Jean Delumeau

4
8/9/2019 Sin and Fear (13th-18th centuries) - Jean Delumeau http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/sin-and-fear-13th-18th-centuries-jean-delumeau 1/4 Medieval Academy of America Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th-18th Centuries. by Jean Delumeau; Eric Nicholson] Review by: Gavin Langmuir Speculum, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Jul., 1992), pp. 657-659 Published by: Medieval Academy of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2863676 . Accessed: 02/03/2013 10:35 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp  . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].  .  Medieval Academy of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Speculum. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 10:35:49 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Transcript of Sin and Fear (13th-18th centuries) - Jean Delumeau

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Medieval Academy of America

Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th-18th Centuries. by JeanDelumeau; Eric Nicholson]Review by: Gavin LangmuirSpeculum, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Jul., 1992), pp. 657-659Published by: Medieval Academy of America

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2863676 .

Accessed: 02/03/2013 10:35

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

 .JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of 

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

 .

 Medieval Academy of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to

Speculum.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 10:35:49 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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JEAN

DELUMEAU,

Sin

and Fear: The

Emergence of

a

Western Guilt

Culture,

13th-18th

Centuries.

Trans.

Eric Nicholson. New York: St. Martin's

Press,

1990.

Pp.

x,

677.

$39.95.

Originally published

as

Le

peche

et la

peur

in

1983

by

Artheme

Fayard.

When Jean Delumeau was ten, a relatively young friend of the family died suddenly.

Delumeau was so

physically frightened

by

that

unexpected

death that he was sick for

three

months and unable

to

go

to school.

Two

years

later,

he entered a Salesian

college,

where his

physical

fear

of

death was transformed into a

theological

fear,

for

which

a

remedy

was

offered. These

experiences,

as

he

tells

us,

lie behind

his massive

study

of fear in La

peur

en Occident

(1978)

and of sin in Le

peche

et la

peur

(1983).

Le

peche

et

la

peur,

which

presents

Delumeau's main

thesis,

has now been translated

by

Eric

Nicholson. The

translation

is excellent

despite

some minor obscurities

and

a

couple

of

slips.

Thus Thomas N. Tentler becomes Theodore N. Tentler

(p.

220),

and

Rene Girard becomes Rene Girand

(p.

300).

Unfortunately,

footnotes which refer to

fuller discussions of a

point

elsewhere in the text cite

pages

in the French, not the

English,

edition. And since the

English

edition is

unrevised,

there

are,

as the trans-

lator's

preface

notes,

no references

to the recent work of

Elaine

Pagels,

Natalie Zemon

Davis,

Jacques

Le

Goff,

Jaroslav

Pelikan,

and

Christopher

Hill,

among

others.

There

is

an index of

authors but no

bibliography

and no

subject

index,

badly though

it

is

needed.

Whereas

La

peur

en

Occident

depicted

early-modern

Europe

as

besieged

by

real and

imaginary

fears and described the

persecutions

to which

they gave

rise,

Sin and Fear

focuses

on sin and

guilt.

It is a massive book. The text runs

to

557

pages

of rather

small

print,

and the

notes,

some

3,900,

to 99 more

pages.

It

is

heavy

also

in that

it

presents

an almost

unrelieved

picture

of

gloom

and doom.

Believing

in

Original

Sin

(p.

3),

Delumeau has written a cultural

history

of sin

in

western

Europe

which

argues

that,

in

the

atmosphere

of fear described

in La

peur

en

Occident,

fearful Christian

churchmen became obsessed with sin and instilled a

pathological

sense of

guilt

in

early-modern Europeans.

No civilization had ever attached

so much

importance

to

guilt

and

shame as did

the Western world from the thirteenth to the

eighteenth

centuries

(p.

3).

In

part

1,

Pessimism and the Macabre

in

the

Renaissance,

Delumeau seeks

to

offset

the view of the Renaissance as a

period

of

optimism.

He

quotes

or

paraphrases

a host of anxious statements about death, bodily decay, violence, fortune, cosmic

disorder,

folly,

human

fragility,

and

melancholy by major

and

minor

writers from

Innocent

III

to Burton. He also discusses

many examples

of the Dance

of

Death and

other

morbid

images

in

art and ritual.

Each

subtheme

repeats

the thesis about the

deep

and

widespread anxiety

and

pessimism

of

the

period.

Thus Delumeau asserts

that the

considerable

place

given

to

folly

in

the discourse of

European

literate

culture

during

some 150

years

involves the crisis of an entire civilization

(p.

131)

and that

the

epoch's indisputable

interest

in

suicide reveals a collective sadness

(p.

185).

Part

2,

A

Failure

of

Redemption, similarly

relies on

quotation

and

paraphrase,

primarily

of

clerical

writers,

to

argue

that

the doctrine of sin

purveyed by

ecclesiastics

was responsible for the dominant pessimism of early modern Europe : At the heart

of

this cultural

'melancholy'

lies the

bitter

certainty

that

humans

are

great

sinners

(p.

189).

Delumeau traces

the

development

of doctrine about

sin,

from the Old

Testament

through Augustine

to the

development

in the thirteenth

century

of

private

confession

and the manuals for

confessors,

a

development

he sees as a

major

caesura

in

the

history

of

Christianity (p.

199).

He discusses in detail the

spectacular

rise in

the

literature about sin after that caesura:

the

way

sins were

categorized

as

deadly

or

venial,

the

changes

in

the

importance

attributed to

particular

sins,

and

the

increasingly

Reviews

657

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minute

categorization

of sins. He concludes that

most

people's

minds were

now

preoccupied

with the fear of

Deadly

Sin

(p.

240).

This assertion

is reinforced

by

examples

from

iconography

and

by

a somewhat dated discussion

of

lay

attitudes

to

children that

relies

heavily

on the work of others

(pp.

271-81).

The heart of Delumeau's thesis emerges in chapter 9. He emphasizes that the most

eminent

thinkers from

antiquity

to the nineteenth

century

agreed

that

only

a

tiny

minority

would be saved and

argues

that this

terrifying

doctrine

was

most

influential

in the

early-modern

period.

He

declares that

to re-create the

terrifying

image

of

God

that

this

doctrine

implied

leads

to

the

very

heart of

a

history

of

mentalities

(p.

293).

It

leads

Delumeau to draw

on

psychological theory

and to

ascribe to

the

period

a

collective

guilt complex

(p.

296),

which was

the result of the

religious

and

patho-

logical

deviance of

a

Christianity

that focuses its

message

on the

evocation

of sin

and

which

narrows its aim to the

fight

against

sinning (p.

297).

He

traces

this

obsession

with

absolute

purity

back

to

monastic asceticism and condemns

its

angelic

anthro-

pology (pp. 9, 449) as antinatural. At the core of this psychosis lies the refusal to

accept

one's own

body

and desires

(p.

298).

Delumeau

recognizes only

one

remedy:

One

escapes

from

this

neurosis-producing

conception

only

via a different

reading

of the

story

of

Redemption

and

a

different

interpretation

of not

only Jesus'

'sacrifice'

but

more

generally any

sacrifice

that

offers

God

the best

that man

has to

offer

(p.

300).

Part

3,

An

Evangelism

of

Fear

in

the Catholic

World,

describes

the

discourse

in

sermons,

hymns,

and treatises on

preparation

for death

which

Catholic

churchmen

used

to instill

guilt

in

their audiences.

Almost

inevitably

this

section

repeats

many

of

the sentiments

already

quoted

at

length

in

parts

1

and

2

about the

decay

of

the

body,

the

macabre,

sin,

eternal

torment,

the

difficulty

of

being

saved,

and

contempt

of

the

world.

The

image

of

God

that

emerges

from this

concerted

theological

campaign

(p.

420)

is that

of a

terrifying

god

of

justice,

not of

mercy,

an

image

that,

Delumeau

is

glad

to

report,

no

longer applies

today (p.

421).

Part

4

applies

the same

method

to

Protestantism

in a

much

more hurried

fashion and

has

no

difficulty

in

demonstrating

that

Protestant

churchmen,

especially

the

Puritans,

often utilized

many

of

the

same

themes

in

order to

frighten

their flocks into

virtue.

Delumeau's

basic

historical method

throughout

is

to take

a

theme

such

as

the

Dance

of

Death,

melancholy,

sin,

or confession and to demonstrate

how

deep-rooted

anxiety

and pessimism were by quoting, often at considerable length, a host of examples

selected from

a wide

variety

of

writings

of the

period, by

paraphrasing

many

other

writings,

by

many

references to

iconography,

and

by

references to

modern

studies.

These

carefully

garnered

quotations

and

paraphrases

are linked

by

a

sparkling style

and

interspersed

with

many

interesting

insights,

for

example,

on

the

period's

fasci-

nation

with

utopias.

But

there are so

many

quotations

and

paraphrases,

and

their

message

is so

repetitive,

that the reader soon

grasps

the

topoi

and

becomes

wearied

with

further illustrations

of

variations in their

expression.

Sin

and

Fear

is an

impressive

display

of dark

thoughts

in

a

period

typically

seen

as

one

of

optimism

and liberation. And to demonstrate how

widely

they

were

held,

Delumeau provides publishing statistics throughout the book for many of the works

and

iconographic

motifs

he

cites.

Yet it is a

large

jump

from

that

evidence

to

the use

of terms

such

as collective

mentality,

collective

anxiety,

or

collective

guilt

com-

plex (pp.

76, 99, 115, 153, 185, 237,

296).

Proof

of

the diffusion of

ideas is

unreliable

evidence

of the reactions or mentalities of

those

addressed.

As Delumeau

is careful to

point

out,

the

morbid reflections he

quotes

come

mainly

from literate

men of

the

church

and

personalities

moved

by profound

religious

concern,

members of the cultivated

elite

(pp.

121,

153,

209,

213,

315, 524,

556).

But

658

Reviews

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he

does not examine these writers

in

the round to see whether the

gloomy

attitudes

they

expressed

in

these

passages

in

fact dominated

their

personalities

and

daily

lives

or

whether

they expressed

them earlier or later

in their lives.

And

though

he

asserts

that

the churchmen who

propounded

these

terrifying

views were moved

by

their own

fears and not primarily concerned to defend their own power (pp. 321, 329, 471,

556),

he asserts rather than

proves

the

point.

He

makes no serious

attempt

to differ-

entiate

between

the

more

scrupulous

churchmen who

were

genuinely

fearful

of

damnation and those

who

used

a

variety

of tricks

to

indoctrinate,

frighten,

and control

the

laity (pp.

332-41).

More

troubling

is his inference from these

expressions

of the clerical elite to

generalizations

about a

collective

guilt complex

of the

population

at

large.

Though

the book is a wonderful

depiction

of clerical

pessimism

in a

period

in

which first

Catholicism and then other

religions

were

fighting

in

retreat,

its trickle-down

theory

of

collective

psychology

is

open

to

challenge.

As

Delumeau

has to

acknowledge,

there

was considerable anticlericalism and inertial resistance to confession

(pp.

463,

469),

and

preachers complained bitterly

that

people

were not

behaving

the

way they

were

told to

(pp.

403, 414,

442-44,

463).

Moreover,

in a

period

in which

people

were

increasingly

conscious

of

themselves

as

individuals,

we

cannot assume that

they

all

thought

alike.

Would

an examination in

depth

of the lives of

Chaucer,

Philip

the

Good of

Burgundy,

the

Borgias,

the

Medici, Cellini,

Henry

the

Navigator, Christopher

Columbus,

Rabelais,

Henry

II or IV of

France,

Pierre

Bayle,

Elizabeth I of

England,

Marlowe,

or Drake

support

the

thesis

of a

collective

pessimism

and

psychosis?

Were

their minds

-

to

say nothing

of the

minds of the

bulk of

the

population

-

preoc-

cupied

with the fear of

Deadly

Sin?

It

may

be doubted.

GAVIN

LANGMUIR,

Stanford

University

CHRISTOPHER

DYER,

Standards

of Living

in the Later Middle

Ages:

Social

Change

in

England,

c. 1200-1520.

(Cambridge

Medieval

Textbooks.)

Cambridge, Eng.:

Cam-

bridge

University

Press,

1989.

Pp.

xvi, 297;

4

maps,

8

figures,

and

19

tables.

$49.50

(cloth);

$14.95

(paper).

In

assessing

the

success

of

this

study

of material

life,

it is

important

to

understand

that the author intends it to serve two purposes. It is published in the Cambridge

Medieval

Textbook series

and thus

is

designed

for classroom

purposes.

Its

second

aim is to

provide

an

overall

survey

for the scholar or

general

reader. Both of these

goals

must be

addressed

in this review.

The

book

is

organized along

the lines of social class: three

chapters

on the

aristo-

crats,

two on the

peasants,

one on

the urban

population,

one on the

wage

earners,

and one

on

the

poor.

Within

this

framework,

the

incomes,

consumption patterns,

and

living

standards

(including housing,

furniture,

clothing,

tools

and other

implements,

and

food)

are

all

discussed. The

author also

includes

a number of

personal

observa-

tions

about

living

standards,

which

likewise have a

loose

basis

in

social-class

analysis.

The author uses a combination of types of evidence, including archaeology, wills,

inventories,

household

accounts,

and various court records. One

would

not

expect

a

synthetic

work to contain

a

great

deal of

original

research,

and

this one does not.

One

disappointing aspect

of the

book,

from the

point

of view

of

a

scholar,

is that its

use of available

secondary

studies is

rather limited.

Not even

half of

what is in

print

on

the material life

of

late-medieval

Englanders appears

in the footnotes

or

bibliog-

raphy.

Because of such

sparse reading,

some

of

Dyer's interpretations

are inaccurate

or

inadequate.

For

instance,

in

the

chapter

on

charity

he has

a

long

discussion

about

he

does not examine these writers

in

the round to see whether the

gloomy

attitudes

they

expressed

in

these

passages

in

fact dominated

their

personalities

and

daily

lives

or

whether

they expressed

them earlier or later

in their lives.

And

though

he

asserts

that

the churchmen who

propounded

these

terrifying

views were moved

by

their own

fears and not primarily concerned to defend their own power (pp. 321, 329, 471,

556),

he asserts rather than

proves

the

point.

He

makes no serious

attempt

to differ-

entiate

between

the

more

scrupulous

churchmen who

were

genuinely

fearful

of

damnation and those

who

used

a

variety

of tricks

to

indoctrinate,

frighten,

and control

the

laity (pp.

332-41).

More

troubling

is his inference from these

expressions

of the clerical elite to

generalizations

about a

collective

guilt complex

of the

population

at

large.

Though

the book is a wonderful

depiction

of clerical

pessimism

in a

period

in

which first

Catholicism and then other

religions

were

fighting

in

retreat,

its trickle-down

theory

of

collective

psychology

is

open

to

challenge.

As

Delumeau

has to

acknowledge,

there

was considerable anticlericalism and inertial resistance to confession

(pp.

463,

469),

and

preachers complained bitterly

that

people

were not

behaving

the

way they

were

told to

(pp.

403, 414,

442-44,

463).

Moreover,

in a

period

in which

people

were

increasingly

conscious

of

themselves

as

individuals,

we

cannot assume that

they

all

thought

alike.

Would

an examination in

depth

of the lives of

Chaucer,

Philip

the

Good of

Burgundy,

the

Borgias,

the

Medici, Cellini,

Henry

the

Navigator, Christopher

Columbus,

Rabelais,

Henry

II or IV of

France,

Pierre

Bayle,

Elizabeth I of

England,

Marlowe,

or Drake

support

the

thesis

of a

collective

pessimism

and

psychosis?

Were

their minds

-

to

say nothing

of the

minds of the

bulk of

the

population

-

preoc-

cupied

with the fear of

Deadly

Sin?

It

may

be doubted.

GAVIN

LANGMUIR,

Stanford

University

CHRISTOPHER

DYER,

Standards

of Living

in the Later Middle

Ages:

Social

Change

in

England,

c. 1200-1520.

(Cambridge

Medieval

Textbooks.)

Cambridge, Eng.:

Cam-

bridge

University

Press,

1989.

Pp.

xvi, 297;

4

maps,

8

figures,

and

19

tables.

$49.50

(cloth);

$14.95

(paper).

In

assessing

the

success

of

this

study

of material

life,

it is

important

to

understand

that the author intends it to serve two purposes. It is published in the Cambridge

Medieval

Textbook series

and thus

is

designed

for classroom

purposes.

Its

second

aim is to

provide

an

overall

survey

for the scholar or

general

reader. Both of these

goals

must be

addressed

in this review.

The

book

is

organized along

the lines of social class: three

chapters

on the

aristo-

crats,

two on the

peasants,

one on

the urban

population,

one on the

wage

earners,

and one

on

the

poor.

Within

this

framework,

the

incomes,

consumption patterns,

and

living

standards

(including housing,

furniture,

clothing,

tools

and other

implements,

and

food)

are

all

discussed. The

author also

includes

a number of

personal

observa-

tions

about

living

standards,

which

likewise have a

loose

basis

in

social-class

analysis.

The author uses a combination of types of evidence, including archaeology, wills,

inventories,

household

accounts,

and various court records. One

would

not

expect

a

synthetic

work to contain

a

great

deal of

original

research,

and

this one does not.

One

disappointing aspect

of the

book,

from the

point

of view

of

a

scholar,

is that its

use of available

secondary

studies is

rather limited.

Not even

half of

what is in

print

on

the material life

of

late-medieval

Englanders appears

in the footnotes

or

bibliog-

raphy.

Because of such

sparse reading,

some

of

Dyer's interpretations

are inaccurate

or

inadequate.

For

instance,

in

the

chapter

on

charity

he has

a

long

discussion

about

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