Sleepless souls : suicide in early modern England
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Sleepless souls : suicide in early modern England
（Oxford studies in social history）
Clarendon Press , Oxford University Press, 1990
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Note
Bibliography: p. [367]-371
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Sleepless Souls is a social and cultural history of suicide in early modern England. Self-murder was regarded as a heinous crime in Tudor and Stuart England, and was subject to savage punishments. Those who committed suicide had their property forfeited to the crown, and their bodies were denied Christian burial and desecrated. In Georgian England suicide was in practice de-criminalized, tolerated and even sentimentalized.
Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, using a wide variety of contemporary sources, especially local records, trace the causes of this dramatic change in attitude. They analyse suicide within its contemporary context, relating shifts in opinion and practice to the complex framework of life in early modern England. Political events, religious changes, philosophical fashions, conflicts between centre and localities, and differing class interests all played their part. The authors' focus on
the trauma of death by suicide uncovers the forces that were reshaping the mental outlook of different English classes and social groups. Their detailed and scholarly exploration of the `crime' of self-murder thus provides a history of social and cultural change in English society over three
centuries.
Table of Contents
- List of tables
- List of figures
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- I. The Era of Severity: The rise of self-murder
- The instigation of the devil
- Opposition and ambivalence
- II. The Secularization of Suicide: The revival of leniency
- The invention of suicide
- Elite opinions, Plebeian beliefs
- III. The Hermeneutics of Suicide: The identification of suicides
- Motives for suicide
- The medium and the message
- Epilogue
- Appendices: 1. Sources
- Statistics
- Bibliography: Manuscript sources
- Contemporary periodicals
- Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
