Liberal Arts Faculty Books
Title
From Sin to Insanity: Suicide in Early Modern Europe
Files
Description
In the broadest treatment yet of suicide in Europe during the period 1500–1800, 11 authors combine elements of social, cultural, legal, and intellectual history to trace important changes in the ways Europeans experienced and understood voluntary death. Well into the seventeenth century, Europeans viewed suicide as a terrible crime and an unforgivable sin resulting from demonic temptation. By the late eighteenth century, however, suicide was rarely subject to judicial penalties, and society tended to blame self-inflicted death on insanity rather than on the devil. From Sin to Insanity shows that early modern Europe witnessed nothing less than the birth of modern suicide: increasing in frequency, self-inflicted death became decriminalized, secularized, and medicalized, viewed as a regrettable but not shameful result of reversals in fortune or physical or mental infirmity. The ten chapters focus on suicide cases and attitudes toward self-murder from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries in geographical settings as diverse as Scandinavia and Hungary, France and Germany, England and Switzerland, Spain and the Netherlands.
ISBN
9780801442780
Publication Date
1-1-2004
Relational Format
book
Department
Arch Dalrymple III Department of History
Publisher
Cornell University Press
Disciplines
European History | Family, Life Course, and Society
Recommended Citation
Watt, Jeffrey R., "From Sin to Insanity: Suicide in Early Modern Europe" (2004). Liberal Arts Faculty Books. 145.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/libarts_book/145