ABSTRACT
Naive culture is the base point in the cultural history of guilt. While the first transformations out of the Middle Ages were under way, signs of increasing guilt were appearing in religious belief and practice. The doctrine of purgatory became much more important in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The cultural stage of rampant, uncultured guilt is typified by individuals being afflicted by outbursts of chronic anxiety that often bring with them a sense of depravity, culpability, and unsettledness. The stage of rampant, uncultured guilt in English history occupies roughly the period 1530–1600, although signs can be seen beforehand, especially in the fourteenth century, and its presence shadowed the years right up to the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The cultural stage of ‘persecutory guilt’ is typified by the predominance of a religion projecting God as harshly punitive, distant, and all-powerful, and the human as sinfully low and worthless.
