Conclusion

Through a global comparison, the early modern European paradox of self­killing which emerged during the Renaissance is thrown into sharper con­trast. While Christian norms condemned self-killing perhaps more than in any other contemporary society, the Renaissance reintroduced arguments from classical antiquity allowing its justification under certain circumstances.

Suicide is a universal human activity liable to be interpreted either posi­tively or negatively by any society contingent upon moral values, social circumstances and particular events. Not all cultures have been equally or morbidly concerned with suicide as a public problem; here too, the West led and continues to lead. Suicide excludes accidental death, but can include high-risk behaviours without regard for personal safety and in certain knowledge of self-annihilation, whatever the motivation. Behaviours placing the self in imminent danger and at certain risk of violent death by another (martyrdom and self-sacrifice, for example) aim at a similarly suicidal out­come. How a given society reacts to self-violence is the product of culture, mentality or cosmology - in a word, it is a product of history. Attitudes towards suicide tend to change slowly and popular attitudes may differ significantly from those of the educated elite. Gender and class play their role in perceptions, but even apparent changes in perception mask funda­mental continuities. Suicide, a term invented during the Enlightenment, was still deeply embedded in a traditional religious and ethical belief system.

We can never truly know why a person chooses to end their life, and attitudes towards self-killing historically speak to us far more about the community values of survivors than they do about individual motivation. For that reason, the history of self-killing during the early modern period is of greater potential use in elucidating belief systems and contemporary reflec­tions on the quality of life, than it is as part in a puzzle to understand the phenomenon of violence against the self sui generis, which will perhaps always remain an existential matter.