A Discussion of Anxiety over the Last Millennium (1000 to 2000)

Abstract

The scope of this paper is a comparison between the forms of anxiety present in advanced societies and those that prevailed around the year 1000. The year 1000 has been described as a period of intense fear of the apocalypse. This theory is disputed today. But even if the documentary sources are rare and diffi cult to interpret, the interest remains to wonder, by comparing them with the current forms, with the anxiety in the medieval world where one often dies young and where the hunger is a permanent risk. While some causes of anxiety may have changed, fundamentally the human species continues to have the same fears. It is disturbing to note that some chroniclers describe for example a panic attack with a symptomatology close to that of the most modern classifi cations.