'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.
- ISBN10 0198205392
- ISBN13 9780198205395
- Publish Date 28 January 1999
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 26 November 2008
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Oxford University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 510
- Language English