Suicide in the Middle Ages: Volume 1: The Violent against Themselves

'Suicide' and 'the Middle Ages' sounds like a contradiction. Was life not too short anyway, and the Church too disapproving, to admit suicide? Examining a wide range of suicides, and exploring how the living reacted to them, Alexander Murray takes the reader on a remarkable odyssey through medieval law, social life, literature, and religion.

`Suicide'' and `the Middle Ages'' sounds like a contradiction. Was life not too short anyway, and the Church too disapproving, to admit suicide? And how is the historian supposed to find out? Alexander Murray takes the last question first, as a key to the testing of all other assumptions. Examining a wide range of documents he shows that there were indeed suicides, of types and configurations astonishingly modern, if not in numbers per capita. As for reactions, they were of two kinds. One was to heap suicide with every imaginable curse, natural and supernatural, and the author''s search for their religious, anthropological, and legal background leads far outside medieval christendom. However, he also uncovers a less negative reaction as, from the eleventh century onwards, medicine, psychology, poetry, and the pastoral priesthood charted ever more assiduously the terra incognita of suicidal emotion.