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History of Suicide

Voluntary Death in Western Culture

Georges Minois
translated by Lydia G. Cochrane

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Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

In this compact and illuminating history, Georges Minois examines how a culture's attitudes about suicide reflect its larger beliefs and values—attitudes toward life and death, duty and honor, pain and pleasure. Minois begins his survey with classical Greece and Rome, where suicide was acceptable—even heroic—under some circumstances. With the rise of Christianity, however, suicide was unequivocally condemned as self-murder and an insult to God. With the Renaissance and its renewed interest in classical culture, suicide reemerged as a...

Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

In this compact and illuminating history, Georges Minois examines how a culture's attitudes about suicide reflect its larger beliefs and values—attitudes toward life and death, duty and honor, pain and pleasure. Minois begins his survey with classical Greece and Rome, where suicide was acceptable—even heroic—under some circumstances. With the rise of Christianity, however, suicide was unequivocally condemned as self-murder and an insult to God. With the Renaissance and its renewed interest in classical culture, suicide reemerged as a philosophical issue. Minois finds examples of changing attitudes in key Renaissance texts by Bacon, Montaigne, Sidney, Donne, and Shakespeare.

By 1700, the term suicide had replaced self-murder and the subject began to interest the emerging scientific disciplines. Minois follows the ongoing evaluation of suicide through the Enlightenment and the Romantic periods, and he examines attitudes that emerge in nineteenth- and twentieth-century science, law, philosophy, and literature. Minois concludes with comments on the most recent turn in this long and complex history—the emotional debate over euthanasia, assisted suicide, and the right to die.

Reviews

Reviews

This book, lucidly translated, makes compulsive reading.

Minois's book follows the religious, philosophical, literary, and judicial debate for and against self-murder from antiquity to the end of the Enlightenment, demonstrating the close connection between political power, religious authority, social status, and the freedom to die... Minois's study is detailed and thorough... Gory anecdotes and effective reference to overarching intellectual trends make the book edifying and morbidly enjoyable.

Minois... has provided a timely chronicle tracing the evolution of societal attitudes toward suicide... Minois writes in an unadorned, concise prose that aids him in treating a serious subject in a serious manner. Although his own convictions on the issue are clear, Minois treats both sides of our current debate with objectivity, understanding, and compassion.

The History of suicide has come of age. After a century of sociological inquiry, historians over the last decade have now embraced this all-too-human act and have produced remarkable results.

Minois has succeeded in pulling together a wide range of materials, and in reminding us how elite attitudes to suicide shifted, and that those shifts may well serve as pointers to some more general developments in the intellectual history of Europe.

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About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
400
ISBN
9780801866470
Table of Contents

Introduction
Part I. Tradition: A Repressed Question
Chapter 1. Suicide in the Middle Ages: Nuances
Chapter 2. The Legacy of the Middle Ages: Between Madness and Despair
Chapter 3. The Classical Heritage

Introduction
Part I. Tradition: A Repressed Question
Chapter 1. Suicide in the Middle Ages: Nuances
Chapter 2. The Legacy of the Middle Ages: Between Madness and Despair
Chapter 3. The Classical Heritage: Perfecting the Timely Exit
Part II. The Renaissance: A Question Raised, Then Stifled
Chapter 4. The Early Renaissance: Rediscovery of the Enigma of Suicide
Chapter 5. To Be or Not To Be: The First Crisis of Conscience in Europe
Chapter 6. The Seventeenth Century: Reaction and Repression
Chapter 7. Substitutes for Suicide in the Seventeenth Century
Part III. The Enlightenment: Suicide Updated and Guilt-Free
Chapter 8. The Birth of the English Malady, 1680-1720
Chapter 9. The Debate on Suicide in the Enlightenment: From Morality to Medicine
Chapter 10. The Elite: From Philosophical Suicide to Romantic Suicide
Chapter 11. The Common People: The Persistence of Ordinary Suicide
Epilogue. From the French Revolution to the Twentieth Century, or, From Free Debate to Silence

Author Bios
Featured Contributor

Lydia G. Cochrane

Lydia G. Cochrane has translated three previous books for Johns Hopkins: On the Edge of the Cliff by Roger Chartier (1996), The Color of Melancholy by Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet (1997), and History of Suicide by Georges Minois (1999). Her other translations include Alain Boureau's The Lord's First Night (1998) and The Myth of Pope Joan (2001), and Renzo Dubbini's Geography of the Gaze (2002).