This book concentrates on the 250 years beteen the late 11th and early 14th centuries and studies two key facets of the rationalistic tradition.

"Suicide" and "the Middle Ages" sounds like a contradiction. Was life not too short anyway, and the Church too disapproving, to admit suicide? And how is the historian supposed to find out?

In this first volume of his trilogy, Alexander Murray takes the methodological question first, as a key to the testing of all other assumptions. After answering it, he shows that there were indeed suicides, of types and configurations astonishingly modern, if not in numbers per capita. "The violent against themselves" included rich and poor, townsmen and peasants, men and women, married and...