The Fear of Hell: Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe by Piero Camporesi (review)

252Rocky Mountain Review in which "the outsiders survive while the society is destroyed" (184), thus taking the definition beyond the limits of the detective novel of manners, perhaps even beyond the editors' definition. Can a novel in which society is destroyed be at the same time a novel in which the self expresses "itself in relation to, but not necessarily in accord with, the values of a society" (4)? Like the volume itself, Sisney's essay challenges us to radically rethink the novel of manners. The fresh and convincing readings by the majority of the essayists are a good start in defining the novel of manners as one seriously and artistically engaged in delineating individual, moral, social, and political conflicts of its time. ANN OWENS WEEKES University ofArizona PIERO CAMPORESI. The Fear of Hell: Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe. Trans. Lucinda Byatt. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990. 221 p. In the modern world, hell can befound here on earth: in putrid chemical waste, in deformed and starving children, in the fear of a nuclear apocalypse. Hell, it seems, has moved from the shadowy netherworld through the bowels ofthe earth and onto our streets, reflecting our darkest fears about the death of the body and the damnation ofthe soul, about the lonely voyage ofthe individual from unconscious birth to fully conscious death. And therefore, according to Piero Camporesi, "it is not clear whether this world is a successful imitation of hell or whether hell is a model of this world" (5). In a work overflowing with evocative images that invigorate and insult the senses, this author investigates the notions of damnation and salvation as they were presented in both institutionalized Catholicism and popular beliefs in Europe in the earty modern period. Camporesi therein traces the concept of hell from Dante's Commedia to the rationalism which permeated eighteenthcentury philosophy and faith, and he does so in a consistently intriguing and thought-provoking manner. The first portion of this work weaves its way through countless litanies of the horrors ofhell as evidenced in numerous (and mainly Italian) religious works, sermons, and practices. In their imagery and in their intended message, Camporesi finds an eternally adjustable hell which adapts in both size and function to the changing conditions ofsociety. Thus Dante's hell, the inverted and class-conscious city located in some infinite underworld, reflects thirteenthcentury Italian urbanization, while a later Baroque version becomes an egalitarian and suffocatingly small tomb which reflects the social upheaval so dreaded by the perfumed and fragile aristocracy of the late seventeenth century. In tracing the changing face and form of Christian damnation, Camporesi deals not only with the idea ofthe increasingly restrictive physical dimensions ofhell, but with their eventual dissolution "into an undecipherable, primitive space, almost more abstract than geometrical" (83). In addition, he implicates two parallel phenomena: the evolution of God from a merciless Book Reviews253 persecutor, born in early Christianity and seconded by Augustinian doctrine, to that of a merciful, rational Father, and, equally significant, the evolution of eternal punishment from physical torture to spiritual torment. In the latter transformation, society gradually evicted devils, torture chambers, and other Medieval paraphenalia from the "space" maintained for the damned and offered in their place the frustrations and unexploded time bombs of modernization. Although fascinating in their every detail, the numerous examples of this volatile hell cited by Camporesi gain added significance in light of their psycho-sociological implications for each historical period described. This is true whether he is discussing the feminization ofhell in the anti-libertine reforms of the eighteenth century or those sermons about God's sadistic nature echoed in a seventeenth-century joke which taunted: "If you make fun of Christ, Christ will make fun of you" (95). In the second section of this work, Camporesi leaves the haunting nightmares of hell to demonstrate the extent to which religious dogma and practice came to reflect a disquieting malaise about the body's fate after death. The central image discussed in this analysis of the believer's hope for resurrection is the sacrament ofcommunion, in which there is union between the earthly body and the creator. The communion wafer...