Delumeau was the first (known) historian of fear, albeit, he only studied the 13-18th century European epoch, in a classic work on fear that all scholars ought to read: book title "Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th-18th Centuries" (St. Martin's Press, 1990).
I myself have scanned this book in various libraries, taken some notes, but not been able to affort to get a copy of this but may someday do so. I just wanted to acknowledge he was a great scholar for us fearists, albeit, his study on fear was not his major expertise but just one such study, from a genre of revisionist history writing in the French 1970-80s, apparently called the "mentalities histories" --a kind of history of mentalities movement. How fascinating... later, a few decades, there appeared the emotion(s) histories movement and it is still going on today.
Found this recent excerpt by radical theologican Matthew Fox :
"French cultural historian Jean Delumeau, in his major study on Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture notes that the fourteenth century birthed a “scruple sickness” that in turn gave birth to a “new fear—the fear of one’s self” and that an “excessive sense of guilt and culpability” created a gap that advanced the “dread of God” over the “fear of God” understood as awe.
He believes the Protestant reformers in the sixteenth century reached a vast audience with their message of doctrine of justification by faith and its emphasis on “the world’s fragility, of its vice and its vanity,” where humans were but “dung” and “filth.”
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