Jean Delumeau

J. Delumeau aborde les différentes facettes du christianisme : qui sont les chrétiens? Que penser du néo-positivisme actuel face au mystère du Christ? Comment croire encore à la culpabilité héréditaire? Que dire aux autorités chrétiennes des questions de vie sociale, de théologie, des rapprochements interreligieux?

Follows the adventures of the author and his 'companion', the beautiful, passionate and mysterious Jayne. She is a statuesque blonde, former swimming champion and model, who excels in the pursuit of pleasure. They wander to and from various romantic locations - Martinique, Zurich, Tahiti, Bora Bora, Mali - which all turn out to be insidiously dangerous and disease-ridden behind their picturesque travel-brochure appearances and their expensive, luxurious hotels. As the author's real life comes to the surface of the fictional fantasy, the narrative gradually takes on more sinister tones: Guibert and Jayne acquire the symptoms of a banal, persistent infection while they are in Mali ... Guibert's AIDS symptoms develop and he undergoes a terrifying new kind of brain scan at a clinic in Washington DC. Les expoits de l'auteur et sa belle compagne, Jayne, dans leurs voyages exotiques. Mais les voyages ne sont pas parfaits. Chaque endroit présente le danger et la maladie. Guibert et Jayne devient malade en Mali et Guibert apprend qu'il est atteint du sida.

On the dust jacket of "Sin and Fear" is a detail of the Bosch painting in which men and women in their baptismal suits are disporting themselves about a garden of earthly delights. Whether the ladies and gentlemen are enjoying lust, or just a bit of artistic luck, is not quite clear, but it does serve as an appropriate introduction to sin and fear and guilt, at least in the 15th Century.

"We hold Christ's cross and Adam's tree to be in one place," wrote John Donne, speaking of the location of the Garden of Eden. Milton thought it "below the Ethiope line" (the equator). And every schoolchild once knew it was at the summit of Dante's "seven storey mountain" of the Purgatorio. Not only the location of the "earthly paradise" but its significance, historical and theological, preoccupied the collective mind and imagination of Europe for at least fifteen-hundred years. Jean Delumeau has devoted himself to understanding the fears that have beset Western thinkers, particularly since the medieval period: how they arose, whether from nature, other human beings, or from some other world. This History of Paradise continues the questioning, telling the story of how the Western mind from the late middle ages to the early modern period conceived the meaning and the place of primordial bliss. It tells of exploratory journeys to the Kingdom of Prester John, of the search for "the happy isles," and of the gradual disillusionment (or enlightenment) that led to the transformation of the notion of a physical Garden of Eden to a metaphysical "state of nature."