Suicide in the Middle Ages: Volume 1: The Violent against Themselves
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Product details
- ISBN 9780199553112
- Weight: 768g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 18 Dec 2008
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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`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.
Alexander Murray is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Praelector in Modern History at University College, Oxford.
