Bibliographic Essay
The history of suicide in the 1880s begins with several brief articles on the Italian Renaissance by Emilio Motta, who was influenced by fellow Swiss cultural historian Jakob Burkhardt and Italian psychiatrist Enrico Morselli s successful Il suicidio: saggio di statistica morale comparata (Milan: Fratelli Dumolard, 1879).
Motta also composed a Bibliographia de Suicidio (Bellinzona: Salvioni, 1890), later complemented by the more extensive Bibliographie des Selbstmordes (Regensburg: Haas & Grabherr, 1927) of German church historian Hans Rost. A special issue of the Journal of Social History 46.3 (2014), ‘The Politics of Suicide', edited by Maria Teresa Brancaccio, Eric Engstrom and David Lederer, demonstrates how public attention culminated in Durkheim's Le Suicide (Paris: F. Alcan, 1897).Early historiography continued to focus on the early modern period. Jürgen Dieselhorst's monograph-sized article, ‘Die Bestrafung der Selbstmorder im Territorium der Reichsstadt Nürnberg', Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 24 (1953), 53-230, examined judicial punishments, while Jean Claude Schmitt's ‘Le suicide au Moyen Age' in the Annales: E.S.C. 31 (1976), 3-28, introduced an anthropological perspective. Markus Schär situated his local study of mentalities, Seelennoten der Untertanen. Selbstmord, Melancholie und Religion in Alten Zürich (Zürich: Chronos Verlag, 1985) within the debate surrounding the treatment of madness initiated by Foucault and Porter.
Two monographs by Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) and, with Terence Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), established the history of suicide as a field in its own right. The early modern European domination of the field continued.
For example, the first major synthesis, Georges Minois's Histoire du suicide: La societe occidentale face a la mort volontaire (Paris: Fayard, 1995), adopted an annaliste case-study model preoccupied with early modern England and France. A more detailed treatment of the Renaissance appears in Alexander Murray's magisterial two-volume History of Suicide in the Middle Ages, vol., The Violent against Themselves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), and vol. ii, The Curse on Self-Murder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), which is noteworthy for its sober methodology and comprehensive detail (a third volume in this series is planned).Nineteenth-century moral statisticians established the so-called First Law of Sociology: Protestants kill themselves more frequently than Catholics. Historians have attempted to trace the origins of this perception back to the Reformation and, in addition to Schär and MacDonald, Jeffrey Watt's Choosing Death: Suicide and Calvinism in early modern Geneva (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2001) provides crude statistical evidence from the birthplace of the Reformed Church. We now also have the excellent results from Lutheran Saxony by Alexander Kästner, Todliche Geschichte(n). Selbsttottungen in Kursachsen im Spannungsfeld von Normen und Praktiken (1547-1815) (Constance: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2012). Comparable suicide statistics from the Catholic Counter-Reformation are available in David Lederer's Madness, Religion and the State in Early Modern Europe: A Bavarian Beacon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Lederer critiques statistical evidence in numerous articles, while establishing how it can be used to corroborate environmental pressures on the social constructions of mentalities, for example witchcraft persecutions and, more generally, the scapegoating of demonic agency.
The Enlightenment ushered in secularisation, dechristianisation and an attendant pathologisation of attitudes to suicide.
The ramifications of secularisation are considered in MacDonald and Murphy and in Lederer. While Vera Lind's Selbstmord in der frühen Neuzeit (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999) points out an elite-popular divide, her claim of a popular impetus behind the decriminalisation of suicide is tenuous. Craig Koslofsky's critique of the secularisation model in ‘Suicide and the Secularisation of the Body in Early Modern Saxony', Continuity and Change 16.1 (2001), 45-70, is challenged by Kästner's more detailed analysis of the Saxon evidence for the Enlightenment. The transition from a religious to an enlightened imperative, which pathologised subjective self-perceptions of suicide, is brilliantly offered up by Andreas Bähr's complex and highly nuanced analysis of the testimony of the self-killers themselves, Der Richter im Ich. Die Semantik der Selbsttottung in der Aufklärung (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002).Two conference volumes have had a major impact on the direction of historical suicide studies. While Jeffrey Watt (ed.), From Sin to Insanity: Suicide in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004) treated the subject from a truly pan-European perspective, Hans Medick and Andreas Bähr (eds.), Sterben von Eigener Hand. Selbsttottung als kulturelle Praxis (Vienna: Bohlau Verlag, 2005) represents a first attempt at global comparison. Efforts towards a global history of suicide have culminated in Marzio Barbagli's sociological interpretation of self-killing across time and throughout the planet, Congedarsi dal mondo. Il suicidio in Occidente e in Oriente (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009). For those seeking quick access to a regularly updated list of works on the history of suicide, see the online bibliography of Alexander Kästner, www.academia.edu/13164623/Suicide_in_Earl y_Modern_Europe_and_the_European_Colonies_A_Selected_Bibliography.