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 historythe emotional debate over euthanasia, assisted suicide, and the right to die.
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: 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
""A broad and thought-provoking discussion of the complexities of suicide. Continually reminding us that the legalities and theoretical discussions of suicide often do not coincide with the reality of suicide, Minois focuses his discussion around Hamlet's famous question, 'to be or not to be,' and this proves to be an effective way to organize and present the large and dense amount of material... This book provides a useful and impressive collection of data and an absorbing discussion of attitudes toward voluntary death.""
