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Punishing the dead? - Suicide, Lordship, and Community in Britain, 1500-1830 (Hardcover, New)
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Punishing the dead? - Suicide, Lordship, and Community in Britain, 1500-1830 (Hardcover, New)
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What can we learn from suicide, that most personal and often
inscrutable of acts? This strikingly original work shows how, from
treatment of suicides in historic Britain, unique insights can be
gained into the development of both social and political
relationships and cultural attitudes in a period of profound
change. Drawing ideas from a range of disciplines including law,
philosophy, the social sciences, and literary studies as well as
history, the book comprehensively analyses how successful and
attempted suicide was viewed by the living and how they dealt with
its aftermath, using a wide variety of legal, fiscal, and literary
sources. By investigating the distinctive institutional
environments and mental worlds of early modern England and
Scotland, it explains why suicide was treated as a crime subject to
financial and corporal punishments, and it questions modern
assumptions about the apparent 'enlightenment' of attitudes in the
eighteenth century.
The book is divided into two parts. Part one examines the role of
lordship in managing social and economic relationships following
suicide and illuminates the importance of distinctive punishments
inflicted on suicides' bodies for understanding historic
communities. The second part of the book places suicide in its
cultural context, analysing the attitudes of early modern people to
those who killed themselves. It explores religious beliefs and the
place of the devil as well as secular and medical understandings of
suicide's causes in sources that include provincial newspapers.
Informed by continental as well as British research, Punishing the
Dead? explicitly compares England and Scotland, making this a
completely British history. It also offers intriguing evidence for
the importance of cultural regions and local vernaculars that
transcend national boundaries.
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