Suicide in the Middle Ages Volume 1: The Violent Against Themselves by Alexander Murray (OUP, 1998)
Some books, like people, mark you indelibly. The first part of Alexander taught me what history could be: ambitious in scope and humane in detail, rigorously researched and movingly written. This was the first of three volumes (the last is still awaited) in which Murray attempted “the mapping of mental desolation”, hunting across the late medieval centuries in England, France, Germany and Italy for people who took their own lives. He found some 560 - by no means all of those whose suicide was recorded, let alone who died by suicide, but enough cases to discern patterns. For instance, three times as many medieval men as women took their own lives, comparable to 19th-century ratios.
