Fear and its Representations

Fear is a topic that appeals to a wide audience and is particularly of interest today. In the modern world, we fear war and terrorism, economic recession, and environmental degradation: these fears make up a great portion of the fabric of our daily lives. This is a volume of essays on fear and its representations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In it, the authors raise and try to answer questions about the ways in which individuals, families, and nations five-hundred, one-thousand, or even fifteen-hundred years ago approached the idea of fear. The interdisciplinary nature of this volume and its editors (an historian of late antiquity and professor of literature of the Middle Ages) motivates an analysis of fear from a multitude of perspectives and within a host of secular and religious literature, historical treatises, scholastic works, art, and political accounts. The volume covers several main topics: Defining the Nature of Fear; Fear and Religion; Fear in Politics and Cultural Identity; Fear as a Literary and Dramatic Device; The Fears of Courtly Lovers, Knights, and Poets; Fear and the Mystic. Through its breadth, depth, and interdisciplinary focus, the present volume makes a full contribution to the study of fear in medieval and Renaissance culture for historians, art historians, students of language and philosophy and anyone interested in how people in the past have experienced fear.