Suicide in the Middle Ages. I. The Violent Against Themselves (review)

Suicide in the Middle Ages. I. The Violent Against Themselves. By Alexander Murray (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999) 485 pp. $49.95

Murray has long been a gifted and original historian both of things suspected by many historians not to have existed (as in his admirable Reason and Society in the Middle Ages [Oxford 1978]), or to have existed but to have been deliberately and necessarily concealed, as in his well-known studies of confession as a historical source. ¹ In this volume, the first of three, Murray investigates another vexing subject that was--and is--not only often concealed but also disguised and ignored--suicide, "a historical black hole" (47).

Murray's subject is vexing in two other ways. Since Morselli and Durkheim, suicide has largely been a subject for practitioners of disciplines other than history--sociologists, theologians, legal historians, statisticians, and psychologists. ² Murray deals with this "history of a history" lucidly and learnedly, recording and amply justifying historians' belated interest in the subject and gracefully deploying the discoveries and the literature of other disciplines (14-20, 476-480).

Second, suicide, in the Middle Ages, at least, discourages statisticians by its paucity of numbers. Murray documents 560 cases between the ninth and the late fifteenth century in England, France, Germany, and Italy, but he also explains (virtually the thesis of this first volume) why those cases eloquently speak both for larger numbers and for making a place for suicide in the study of early European history.

Murray's task in this first volume is to identify, analyze, and justify, first the historians' escape from the deliberate secrecy of the act itself (Chapter 2), and then the three general categories of sources that serve historians in this instance. Chapters 3 through 5 deal with the evidence of chronicles and Chapters 6 through 11 with that of legal sources--that is, court records, since legal and other theory is reserved for Murray's second volume. Chapters 12 through 14 study religious sources, chiefly collections of miracle stories dealing with family, society, and the physically and mentally ill. Chapters 15 and 16 address the statistical limitations and advantages of Murray's other sources, providing skillful and informative charts and graphs.

Murray also provides a detailed appendix of recorded suicidal incidents (425-475). The plates, tightly linked to, and discussed in, the text, offer more representations of suicide than one would have thought existed. The select bibliography serves both to identify short-title citations in the footnotes and to document the "history of a history" (14-20).

The title of Volume I is taken from Dante, and a Dantean sensibility guides Murray throughout, not least in his discussion of Inferno XIII (81-92), and the alleged suicide attempt by Joan of Arc immediately following (92-96). Murray's suicides emerge here as grimly as do Dante's. They may have opted out of life, but, thanks to Murray's present volume and the promise of the two following, they did not succeed in opting out of very good and eloquent history. But then they probably didn't care.

Edward Peters
University of Pennsylvania

Notes

1. Murray, "Confession as a Historical Source in the Thirteenth Century," in Ralph H. C. Davis and John Michael Wallace-Hadrill (eds.), with the assistance of R. Jeremy Catto and Maurice H. Keen, The Writing of History in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Sir Richard Southern (Oxford, 1981), 275-322; idem, "Confession Before 1215," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, III (1993), 51-81.

2. Henry Morseli, Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics (New York, 1903); Emile Durkheim (trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson), Suicide: A Study in Sociology (London, 1979).

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