Le suicide au Moyen Âge

Studies on suicide number into the thousands, but among these works the perspective of the historian is almost entirely lacking. This essay deals with suicide in feudal society even before the appearance of the word itself. Suicide, at that time, was considered a kind of homicide, a murder of oneself, and resulted in damnation. Despite certain common elements of behavior, it was a reality quite different from today's suicide. A study of approximately fifty concrete cases of suicide permits us, over and above the distinction made at the time between the suicide of a madman and deliberate suicide, to define suicide as a social behavior, consumating a break between the individual and the group. The dynamic treatment of the home-space by the person committing suicide and by the collectivity during the ritual punishment of the corpse, emphasizes this particular sense of suicide as break. The Church condemned suicide, but even more tried to obstruct or prevent the act through the intervention of the confessor. In the courtly romances, situated on the border between nature and culture, one of the functions of the hermit was to help the desperate hero rejoin the living.Schmitt Jean-Claude. Le suicide au Moyen Âge. In: Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations. 31ᵉ année, N. 1, 1976. pp. 3-28