A01=Georges Minois
assisted suicide
Author_Georges Minois
Category=JHBZ
Category=NHTB
cultural history
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
mental illness
Product details
- ISBN 9780801866470
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 12 Jun 2001
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In this compact and illuminating history, Georges Minois examines how a culture's attitudes about suicide reflect its larger beliefs and values-attitudes toward life and death, duty and honor, pain and pleasure. Minois begins his survey with classical Greece and Rome, where suicide was acceptable-even heroic-under some circumstances. With the rise of Christianity, however, suicide was unequivocally condemned as self-murder and an insult to God. With the Renaissance and its renewed interest in classical culture, suicide reemerged as a philosophical issue. Minois finds examples of changing attitudes in key Renaissance texts by Bacon, Montaigne, Sidney, Donne, and Shakespeare. By 1700, the term suicide had replaced self-murder and the subject began to interest the emerging scientific disciplines. Minois follows the ongoing evaluation of suicide through the Enlightenment and the Romantic periods, and he examines attitudes that emerge in nineteenth- and twentieth-century science, law, philosophy, and literature. Minois concludes with comments on the most recent turn in this long and complex history-the emotional debate over euthanasia, assisted suicide, and the right to die.
Georges Minois is the author of fourteen books on topics as diverse as the church and science, the church and war, Henry VIII, and the history of Europe. Lydia G. Cochrane has translated many works, including Roger Chartier's On the Edge of the Cliff for Johns Hopkins.
