From sin to insanity
Subtitle: suicide in early modern Europe
By: edited by Jeffrey R. Watt
Contributors: Watt, Jeffrey R. 1958-
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2004
Place of publication: Ithaca, N.Y
Language: eng
Number of pages: 240
Subjects: Suicide -- Europe -- History; Suicidal behavior -- Europe -- History; Social history
Description: "In the broadest treatment yet of suicide in Europe during the period 1500-1800, eleven 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."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [191]-230) and index