From Sin to Insanity: Suicide in Early Modern Europe (review)

Practices and attitudes related to suicide provide historians with rich sources of information on past mentalities. From Sin to Insanity, a collection of essays edited by Jeffrey Watt, builds on the thesis that the period between 1500 and 1800 saw a "dramatic change" in the "attitudes toward and experiences surrounding voluntary death." During the eighteenth century, the perception of suicide shifted. From a sinful and criminal act attributed to diabolical temptation, it became medicalized, caused by melancholy, mental illness, or personal problems. Verdicts of insanity became more prevalent. Harsh punishments such as confiscation of property, burial in unconsecrated grounds, and desecration of corpses decreased. The ten essays in this collection illustrate the leniency of the courts in regards to the bodies and goods of those who committed suicide, a change that was less the result of prominent thinkers such as Voltaire and Montesquieu and more the result of a growing belief "that sentences against the bodies and estates of suicides harmed only innocent survivors." The evidence used consists mostly of court records. The emphasis is placed on the social, legal, and cultural history of suicide. If the argument is not new and is reminiscent of, for example, Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy's Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England, it is broadened here to include various regions and periods. From Amsterdam, Budapest, London, Stockholm, and Geneva to Paris, amongst others, the book finds its richness in the fact that it explores new territory and suggests regional diversity in the attitudes of early modern Europeans while illustrating broader trends of the period. The range of topics discussed here is extensive, from the experience of the individual contemplating suicide to the body of the dead and the legal decisions surrounding inheritances. Historians of early modern religion will most likely find greater interest in: Paul Seaver's work on mid-seventeenth-century London, where the diocese allowed many Christian burials of suicides at a time when the British clergy was denouncing it; Craig Koslofsky's essay on the disposal of the bodies of suicides, and the conflicts between Church and city officials in Electoral Saxony in the early eighteenth century; or Arne Jansson's study of suicidal murders in Stockholm, where some committed crimes with the sole intent of being sentenced to death by the courts, thereby avoiding the eschatological consequences of self-murder. If the framework here is the changes in attitudes toward suicide from religious to medical, the focus is on legal history. Despite its title, From Sin to Insanity is not a collection about medicine, madness, mental illness, or religion as the essays do not deal with the religious or scientific debates associated with voluntary death. It does offer, however, a fascinating account of the changing judicial practices of the period as they related to suicide.