Nor Song, nor Bells Shall Sound : Decriminalisation of Suicide Between Secularisation and Medicalisation in the 17th to 19th Century
Abstract
The main aim of this book, which represents within the Czech environment the very first comprehensive, book-length treatment of this topic from a historical perspective, is to trace the development in the approach to suicide between the end of the seventeenth and the second half of the nineteenth century. The key issue is decriminalisation of suicide in terms of evolution of legal prosecution but also with respect to changes in the perception of the very possibility of criminal punishment of suicides and evolution of understanding of suicides' state of mind.
This is closely linked to the fluctuating balance of power between the secular authorities and the Church (as reflected in the secularisation and medicalisation of suicide) but also to a (re)configuration of relations within a community. In the Czech Lands as well as in the Upper and Lower Austria, suicide was fully de-penalised, i.e., deemed not punishable by secular law, only in 1850.
The authors highlight discrepancies between the practice of courts and existing legislation, but also the changes in, modifications of, and ways of circumventing contemporary legal norms in the course of the two preceding centuries. It is shown that despite a clear tendency to decriminalise suicide and a gradual shift to viewing it from a medical and scientific perspective, this shift and change of perspective was far from unequivocal and direct.
In fact, it was rather complex and marked by various inconsistencies which appear once we start comparing the discursive and the practical aspect of the issue. Investigation shows that the normative aspect did not necessarily correspond to the social practice and cannot therefore be viewed as a reliable indicator of change.
Another aspect of the issue investigated in this study are changes in the jurisdiction of secular and ecclesiastic authorities, as well as a growing importance of medical professionals during investigation of suicides and determination of the form of punishment. At a time when even among scholars there existed no clear concept of mental diseases, much less their classification, at a time when future psychiatry was just about starting to take shape (and only as an academic discipline that rarely found its way into practice), suicide was in fact one of most prominent phenomena in connection with which the notion of a mental disease would come up at all. *** The first part of the book deals with various modalities of criminalisation and different ways of treating the bodies of suicides in pre-Enlightenment Europe.
Subsequently, the focus shifts to the court practice in the Czech Lands of late seventeenth and eighteenth century. The period between serf uprisings around 1680 and the end of the rule of Empress Maria Theresa was marked, at least on the level of explicit legislation, by relatively strong repression.
Even so, at the centre of 'struggles' for the bodies of suicides was since late seventeenth and early eighteenth century not the secular repression of suicide but rather the consequences of punishment by the Church, that is, the issue of (ban on) burial in the consecrated ground of the cemetery. In addition to printed texts of mostly normative nature, the analysis rests mainly on rich and well-preserved patrimonial collections from southern Bohemia kept in the State Regional Archive in Třeboň.
Chapters of the second part of the book focus on changes in the intellectual climate especially in connection with the Enlightenment. Their aim is to briefly outline at least the most important European discussions which affected various areas of knowledge: law, theology, but also literature.
To gain a better understanding of the growing role of healthcare professionals, it was necessary to introduce debates that took place within the medical circles in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and led to a medicalisation - or rather psychiatric pathologizing - of suicidal behaviour. These passages drew mainly on authors from the German-speaking environment with emphasis on persons who were active in the Habsburg Monarchy, including the Prague university, but some French authors had to be mentioned as well.
The third part of the book is dedicated to the process of decriminalisation de iure during the post-Enlightenment Era and in the course of the nineteenth century. Late eighteenth and the first two thirds of the nineteenth century were a time of increasing tensions between the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, between the state and the Church.
These frictions often came to the fore also on a local level in the form of smaller but also larger conflicts between representatives of the secular administration and representatives of the Church. In fact, the various cases of suicide in various places, though at first sight they may seem quite marginal, tended to concentrate the conflict potential and reveal the background of this struggle.
To wit, decriminalisation on its own did not lead to a full exculpation, because suicide still has not been fully 'secularised' and lifted out of the canon law, while collective perception of suicide and manifestations of fear linked to it took even far longer to change. The various 'fights' for the body and soul of a suicide, which often resulted in prolonged court processes on the level of both secular and ecclesiastical authorities, left a legacy of relatively rich source materials which document the spiritual changes that took place in the Late Enlightenment Era and a large part of the nineteenth century.
Changes took place not only on the level of (state) legislation but also on the level of the Church law and its interpretation. And last but not least, during Late Enlightenment, we can see that alongside the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, another important actor is becoming involved: medical experts who, in the course of the nineteenth century, often came to have a decisive say in the struggles over further treatment of suicide's body.
These sections draw on well-documented processes that took place in the German-speaking environment of the Krumlov estate and adjoining south Bohemian manors. To provide a richer picture, these cases were confronted with materials from other areas of Bohemia and Moravia, for instance the Rožmitál manor in what was then the Prácheň region, Potštát manor in Přerov region, or various areas north of Prague, from Mladá Boleslav and Mělník all the way to Liberec and Krkonoše (Giant Mountains), including Litoměřice region.
For the period after 1850, i.e. the time when suicide was no longer a criminal offence but remained a grave sin from the perspective of the canon law, the text relies on rich and uniquely surviving documents in the collections of the Episcopal Consistory in Brno. *** The book as a whole is grounded in historical anthropology. In fact, one could think of it in terms of a 'microhistory of a phenomenon', an enterprise closely related to the already established 'microhistory of a conflict'.
In this case, we trace the evolution of a conflict between particular people and secular and, especially, religious norms and authorities that embodied these norms. Classical microhistory tends to focus on particular social groups or closed local communities, which are studied to 'test' more general macroprocesses.
In this investigation, the role of a particular social/local community is assumed by one selected and seemingly 'marginal' phenomenon, suicide. This is then researched in detail in order to capture and analyse more comprehensive social and cultural changes.
By special emphasis on changes in the understanding of suicide, this work also constitutes a contribution to historical semantics sensu lato. It not only tries to explain historical terms and searches for their meaning but aims also at a deeper understanding and more comprehensive interpretation of a particular historical phenomenon.
This historicity, and a non-essentialist, constructivist perspective from which the studied phenomenon is viewed, should ultimately help us realise that the current clinically psychological, sociological, or philosophical interpretations of suicide are far from just a matter of course. On a more general level, we thus approach a number of more general subjects of the period under study: secularisation. medicalisation, individualisation, and even 'Enlightenment' as such.