The Fear of Hell: Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

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 support@jstor.org.. The MIT Press and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Europe. By Piero Camporesi (trans. Lucinda Byatt) (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, I990) 221 pp. $29.95The Fear of Hell is written from a semiological, synchronic perspective. Camporesi repudiates the conventions of traditional, historical methodology. Chronology, context, and linear exposition are replaced by an evocative approach to re-creating the conception of hell and of the eucharist in late sixteenth through eighteenth century Europe. The spirituality of Baroque men (for women are scarcely in evidence) is defined entirely through their relationship to these entities. A welter of texts, including treatises, sonnets, sermons, and legal records, suggest the apparent obsession of this age with the underworld. Through them, the odor, heat, tortures, and mathematical exactitude imagined of hell are described in lurid, excruciating detail.Camporesi's intimacy with the textures and the nuances of his sources is extraordinary, and his mythopoeic, transhistorical vision can be dazzling. Where else could we learn that hell was compared to a stinking tannery, a slimy sewer, and an all-consuming sea of fire obliterating all distinctions of class (62, 79, 82)? Dante's orderly circles of hell were replaced by a suffocating prison in which each body occupied exactly six square feet (70). In 1714, an English theologian professed that hell was not subterranean, but located on the sun, the enormity and scorching heat of which readily could accommodate-and incinerateall sinners (Io5).Gathering such disparate and esoteric sources is a formidable achievement. At the same time, many historians will find Camporesi's approach to be problematic. In his overarching vision, the author chooses to ignore distinctions of time and place. In an early excursus on hell, for example, Camporesi traverses centuries and countries, impressionistically citing Heraclitus (c. 540-480 B.C.), Dante (1265-1321), Fr.