"We hold Christ's cross and Adam's tree to be in one place," wrote John Donne, speaking of the location of the Garden of Eden. Milton thought it "below the Ethiope line" (the equator). And every schoolchild once knew it was at the summit of Dante's "seven storey mountain" of the Purgatorio. Not only the location of the "earthly paradise" but its significance, historical and theological, preoccupied the collective mind and imagination of Europe for at least fifteen-hundred years.

Jean Delumeau has devoted himself to understanding the fears that have beset Western thinkers, particularly since the medieval period: how they arose, whether from nature, other human beings, or from some other world.

This History of Paradise continues the questioning, telling the story of how the Western mind from the late middle ages to the early modern period conceived the meaning and the place of primordial bliss. It tells of exploratory journeys to the Kingdom of Prester John, of the search for "the happy isles," and of the gradual disillusionment (or enlightenment) that led to the transformation of the notion of a physical Garden of Eden to a metaphysical "state of nature."