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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
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8/9/2019 Sin and Fear (13th-18th centuries) - Jean Delumeau
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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
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
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
Reviewseviews 65959
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