Mavi Boncuk |Jean Delumeau (b. June 18, 1923 Nantes) is a French historian specializing in the Catholic church history and author of several books regarding the subject. He held the Chair of the History of Religious Mentalities (1975–1994) at the Collège de France (currently emeritus professor) and is a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres.
1978 La peur en Occident, XIVe-XVIIIe siècles: une cité assiégée by Jean Delumeau The fear in the West is probably the most famous work of the French historian Jean Delumeau, illustrious representative of the Annales School. Delumeau analyzed collective fears in Western Europe in the period between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, trying to answer a simple question: Who is afraid of what? The conclusion is that it's about the fear of death, but it is expressed not only through fear of natural disasters, including plague that causes the most intense collective psychosis, but also by fear of the so-called representatives of Satan on earth: Jews, Turks and ... woman
See also:
Le Péché Et La Peur : La Culpabilisation En Occident XIIIe-XVIIIe Siècles
Sin and Fear: The Emergence of the Western Guilt Culture, 13Th-18th Centuries
From a psychological and sociological point of view, fear (of punishment owing to sin) as a means of religious control played a very large part in western cultural life for centuries. It is extremely helpful, therefore, to have this synthetic and exhaustive study by Jean Delumeau, Professor Emeritus of history at the College de France and prolific and provocative author of works on medieval and modern western religious culture. First published in France in 1983 and available since 1990 in this English translation, Sin and Fear is the second volume of a four-volume work and the only volume translated into English.
Hardcover: 677 pages | Palgrave Macmillan (May 1990)
ISBN-10: 0312035829 | ISBN-13: 978-0312035822
History of Paradise: THE GARDEN OF EDEN IN MYTH AND TRADITION
With erudition and wit, Jean Delumeau explores the medieval conviction that paradise existed in a precise although unreachable earthly location. Delving into the writings of dozens of medieval and Renaissance thinkers, from Augustine to Dante, Delumeau presents a luminous study of the meaning of Original Sin and the human yearning for paradise. The finest minds of the Middle Ages wrote about where paradise was to be found, what it was like, and who dwelt in it. Explorers sailed into the unknown in search of paradisal gardens of wealth and delight that were thought to be near the original Garden.Cartographers drew Eden into their maps, often indicating the wilderness into which Adam and Eve were cast, along with the magical kingdom of Prester John, Jerusalem, Babel, the Happy Isles, Ophir, and other places described in biblical narrative or borrowed from other cultures. Later, Renaissance thinkers and writers meticulously reconstructed the details of the original Eden, even providing schedules of the Creation and physical descriptions of Adam and Eve. Even
when the Enlightenment, with its discovery of fossils and pre-Darwinian theories of evolution, gradually banished the dream of paradise on earth, a nostalgia for Eden shaped elements of culture from literature to gardening.In our own time, Eden's hold on the Western imagination continues to fuel questions such as whether land should be conserved or exploited and whether a return to innocence is possible.
ISBN-10: 0252068807 | ISBN-13: 978-0252068805