| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Georges Minois. History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. (Medicine and Culture.) Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1999. Pp. 387. $35.95.

The history of suicide has come of age. After a century of sociological inquiry, historians over the last decade have now embraced this all-too-human act and have produced remarkable results. Ten years ago, Michael MacDonald and Terence Murphy set new standards for the social and cultural study of suicide by first compiling the most thorough statistical account of self-willed death in England between 1500 and 1800 and then casting doubt upon all such efforts to measure and explain the "suicide rate" (see Michael MacDonald and Terence Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England, 1500–1800 [1990]). In the process, they provided a wonderful essay on the changing religious and philosophical meaning of death and a stimulating inquiry into the power of the popular press to secularize and standardize the experience of self-murder. Others have picked up this high standard and have now produced ambitious books on suicide in the Middle Ages, in early modern Sweden, and in early modern Germany, to name just three prominent and recent works (see Alexander Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages [1998]; Arne Jansson, From Swords to Sorrow: Homicide and Suicide in Early Modern Stockholm [1998]; and Vera Lind, Selbstmord in der Frühen Neuzeit: Diskurs, Lebenswelt und kultureller Wandel am Beispiel der Herogtümer Schleswig und Holstein [1999]). . . .

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