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The Catholic Historical Review 88.1 (2002) 125-126



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Book Review

Choosing Death:
Suicide and Calvinism in Early Modern Geneva


Choosing Death. Suicide and Calvinism in Early Modern Geneva. By Jeffrey R. Watt. [Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies Series.] (Kirksville, Missouri: Truman State University Press. 2001. Pp. xiii, 361. $45.00 clothbound; $30.00 paperback.)

Dr. Watt is to be commended for producing a work that is extremely dense in detail and information and yet very lucid and readable. He begins his fascinating study on the evolution over time of suicide in the Genevan Republic with an excellent introduction to the historiographical and medico-psychological views of suicide as an act and a socio-cultural phenomenon. Moreover, he locates his discussion in the views not only of the people of the early modern world attempting to explain and understand suicide but also of theoreticians and jurists of subsequent centuries. His treatment then moves to a comprehensive analysis of the data surrounding suicides, homicides, and accidental deaths over 250 years of Genevan history. He reports on everything from gender, age, and method of death to seasonality. His second chapter discusses the judicial and intellectual (theoretical) views on suicide. Interestingly, he notes the almost total lack of discussion on the subject by theologians with the exception of Calvin and Daneau, who he notes were both trained lawyers as well as ministers. In addition to discussing theories about suicide, he charts the evolving practical reactions to suicide in the law from the Reformation to the French Revolution, noting the change from corpse desecration and estate confiscation to denial of burial honors and fines to almost no action at all except social embarrassment. Here he also notes at length the developing debate amongst jurists and other thinkers as to the appropriateness and acceptability of suicide in any (and all) circumstances. His conclusion is that even those who argued for suicide's decriminalization were extremely unenthusiastic about the act itself. The third chapter looks at the role of social status, wealth/poverty, and political power in suicide and attempts to see if there is any direct correlation between these factors and a proclivity for self-murder. His final two chapters consider the cultural context of suicide: marriage, love, family, religion, science, medicine, and mentality. These final two chapters, along with the other three and forty maps and tables, present an extremely thorough evaluation of the factors which theoreticians both then and now have posited as causes for suicide. Two important features distinguish this book. First, Watt demonstrates irrefutably the massive increase in the incidence of suicide in the last half of the eighteenth century. Second, he argues persuasively that no single factor can explain [End Page 125] a suicide but that the increase in the place of 'sentiment,' 'romance,' and 'companionate matrimony' may well account for the dramatic increase after 1750. Since he places such strongly argued and well supported emphasis on the place of human relationships in the discussion, it is worth noting that the one factor not discussed at all is the role of sexuality, especially in the deaths of young and/or seemingly unattached men. For example (on pp. 128-129) he discusses the suicide (in 1783) of Etienne Pestre, a nineteen-year-old apprentice grocer, who lamented in a suicide note to his family: "what character, what soul has nature given me? Should I call it sensitive or criminal?" While this may simply be the cry of a tortured soul, there is every reason to suppose that Watt might at least have commented upon the possibility of sexual confusion. Nevertheless, this is a very important work, perhaps the most comprehensive, on suicide in the early modern period and should be read both by scholars and upper level students with enthusiasm.

 



William G. Naphy
University of Aberdeen

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