Punishing The Dead?: Suicide, Lordship, And Community In Britain, 1500-1830
Tags: Robert Allan Houston

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 andhow 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 corporalpunishments, and it questions modern assumptions about the apparent 'enlightenment' of attitudes in the eighteenth century.