Fear & trembling, strangers & strange lands

Jean Delumeau begins his classic study of fear in early-modern Europe with an account, drawn from the travel journals of Montaigne, of entering the great walls of the free imperial city of Augsburg, Germany, by night. 1 Four massive gates, reinforced iron barriers and doors, sealed passageways, a drawbridge, and another bridge traversing a moat together offered a daunting prospect to outsiders while protecting the sixty thousand inhabitants of this prosperous Renaissance city from whatever might disturb their sleep. The city-dwellers had plenty to fear in 1580, the year of Montaigne's arrival. If the Catholic and Protestant soldiers who had ravaged central Europe for decades had temporally laid down their pikes-agreeing to do so in the Peace of Augsburg (1555), brokered in the city itself-Ottoman armies still loomed to the east. To the west, in Montaigne's native France, Christians continued their internecine religious wars without reprieve. Satan, too, lurked outside the city gates, along with demons on the open road, sorcerers and witches in the forests, and darkness itself. Each night wolves across Europe emerged from the black, together with thieves, vagabonds, and brigands-strangers and strange beings all-carrying the threat of violence, misery, and disease

Political science · French Literature and Criticism · History · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Renaissance Literature and Culture

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