`Suicide' and `the Middle Ages' sounds like a contradiction. Was life not too short anyway, and the Church too disapproving, to admit suicide? And how is the historian supposed to find out? In this first volume of his trilogy, Alexander Murray takes the methodological question first, as a key to the testing of all other assumptions. After answering it, he shows that there were indeed suicides, of types and configurations astonishingly modern, if not in numbers per capita. 'The violent against themselves' included rich and poor, townsmen and peasants, men and women, married and unmarried, their motives all too familiar: physical and mental illness, chronic or sudden poverty, arrest, disgrace, heartbreak in love, even what modern doctors might call depression. Following the sources as close to the events as they will lead, the author calls on these fugitives to give an account of themselves. In doing so, they also shed new light on features of their world we thought we all understood.
Reviews
Review from previous edition 'One of the most unusual features of this book is its expansiveness. I cannot think of another academic history monograph that gives so much space to the stories themselves' * - Social History of Medicine *
'Murray tells his stories with great verve and then mulls them over, bringing to bear all the tools of source analysis, but he is never afraid to offer a final opinion of his own. The result is immensely readable' * - Social History of Medicine *
'The years of effort that went into this task have paid rich dividends ... This volume provides us with by far the most detailed record of medieval suicide to date' * - Medical History *
'Alexander Murray is the author of Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (1978), an exemplary "new" history, which reinterprets medieval mentalities on a European scale. Suicide in the Middle Ages is a magnum opus which has been long awaited. It is projected as a trilogy, of which the volume reviewed here is the first ... compelling reading ... Searching for suicides has made Murray a pioneer in the comparative study of the legal records of medieval Europe. ' - * M. T. Clanchy, Times Literary Supplement *



Book Information
ISBN 9780199553112
Author Alexander Murray
Format Paperback
Page Count 510
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 1g
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 156mm * 29mm