| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Jeffrey R. Watt. Choosing Death: Suicide and Calvinism in Early Modern Geneva. (Seventeenth Century Essays and Studies.) Kirksville: Truman State University Press. 2001. Pp. xiii, 361.

The relationship between Protestantism and suicide has been made famous by the seminal work of Emile Durkheim, who based his analysis on data from nineteenth-century Europe. Over the past twenty years, historians of early modem Europe have mined the archives of England, Germany, and Switzerland to study the development of suicide; the monograph under review represents an important contribution to this scholarship. 1

Widely read in the social science theories of suicide—sociological, psychological, gender theory, and physiological—Jeffrey R. Watt analyzes the voluminous documentation of the former city government of Geneva. A thorough search through the relevant sources, which Watt discusses in chapter one, has yielded 404 cases of suicide between the founding of the republic in 1536 and its demise in 1798. The ensuing study is a comprehensive examination of this database that, while informed by the theoretical discussion, is distinguished by a nuanced and sensitive reading of the records. Watt first lays out the sources and methods of his study. The sometimes detailed narratives of the suicide inquests allow him not only to establish an intricate set of statistical analysis (age, occupation, class, gender, seasonality, methods of death, etc.) but also to probe the less apparent aspects of suicide (motives, cultural views, etc.). The remaining chapters focus respectively on the judicial, intellectual, social, economic, political, and the cultural dimensions of suicide. . . .

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