Book reviews -- Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th-18th Centuries by Jean Delumeau and translated by Eric Nicholson

Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th-18th Centuries. By JEAN DELUMEAU. Translated by ERIC NICHOLSON. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990. viii + 677 pp. $39.95 cloth; $18.95 paper.

This is an immense book on a vast subject: the shift, in early modern Europe, from the simple fear of bodily death to a more complex set of fears built around sin, guilt, and the everlasting torment of the soul. The social and political crises that formed the backdrop of this shift, and presumably its cause--the recurrent epidemics of plague, the protracted wars, the brutal riots and rebellions and their still more brutal repression--are all too well known, and Delumeau spends little time on them. Instead, he looks at the cultural consequences of the misfortunes of the age, at the expressions of uneasiness and despair in art, literature, imagery, and general sensibilities. In the popularity of the dance of death and proliferation of monstrous images, he finds a shared sense of a world unstrung and topsy-turvy....