From Sin to Insanity : : Suicide in Early Modern Europe / / ed. by Jeffrey Watt.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Backlist 2000-2013
• MitwirkendeR: Andrew, Donna T.,; Bosman, Machiel,; Boyden, James M.,; Dickenson, Elizabeth G.,; Jansson, Arne,; Koslofsky, Craig M.,; Lederer, David,; Lind, Vera,; Merrick, Jeffrey,; Seaver, Paul S.,; Watt, Jeffrey R.,
• HerausgeberIn: Watt, Jeffrey,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2018]; ©2004
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (256 p.) :; 5 tables, 14 halftones

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List Of Illustrations -- List Of Tables -- Introduction:Toward A History Of Suicide In Early Modern Europe -- 1. The Judicial Treatment of Suicide in Amsterdam -- 2. Suicide and the Vicar General in London:A Mystery Solved? -- 3. Controlling the Body of the Suicide in Saxony -- 4. The Suicidal Mind and Body: Examples from Northern Germany -- 5. Suicidal Murders in Stockholm -- 6. Ambivalence toward Suicide in Golden Age Spain -- 7. Honfibú: Nationhood, Manhood, and the Culture of Self-Sacrifice in Hungary -- 8. Suicide, Gender, and Religion:The Case of Geneva -- 9. Suicide in Paris, 1775 -- 10. The Suicide of Sir Samuel Romilly:Apotheosis or Outrage? -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Contributors -- Index