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Suicide by Proxy became a major societal problem after 1650. Suicidal people committed capital crimes with the explicit goal of earning their executions, as a short-cut to their salvation. Desiring to die repentantly at the hands of divinely-instituted government, perpetrators hoped to escape eternal damnation that befell direct suicides. Kathy Stuart shows how this crime emerged as an unintended consequence of aggressive social disciplining campaigns by confessional states. Paradoxically, suicide by proxy exposed the limits of early modern state power, as governments struggled unsuccessfully to suppress the tactic. Some perpetrators committed arson or blasphemy, or confessed to long-past crimes, usually infanticide, or bestiality. Most frequently, however, they murdered young children, believing that their innocent victims would also enter paradise. The crime had cross-confessional appeal, as illustrated in case studies of Lutheran Hamburg and Catholic Vienna.
Winner of The 2024 Natalie Zemon Davis Prize.
What to do about women (and sometimes, men) who gruesomely murdered children because of their own weariness with life? This was a dilemma faced by elites in German-speaking lands during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and engaged by Kathy Stuart in this strikingly original monograph. A pervasive, if not largely forgotten behavioral pattern featured women who wished to end their lives but feared the doctrine held by Catholics and Protestants alike, that their souls would then face certain damnation. Instead, they would murder a child: their own, someone else s, even one chosen at random, and immediately turn themselves into the authorities. This form of suicide by proxy, as Stuart terms it, resulted in their execution to be sure, but gave them a chance to repent beforehand. To elucidate this troubling history, she mines an impressive array of primary sources from archives throughout Germany and Austria, as well as broadsheets and other forms of art. She draws penetrating insights from law, gender studies, religion, and medicine. To her sophisticated use of empirical research and interdisciplinary perspectives Stuart adds a sense of compassion for these desperate women and the parents of the children murdered during this time of religious and social upheaval.
List of contents
1. Introduction.- 2. Liturgies of Suicide by Proxy.- 3. "Fear God and the Court, while there is still Time." Crime and Zealous Prosecution in Early Modern Hamburg.- 4. "The Unbelievably Frequent Examples of such Murders Committed solely out of Weariness with Life." Hamburg, 1668-1810.- 5. Mary with the Axe. The Cult of the Injured Icon in Baroque Vienna.- 6. The Injured Crucifix: The Emperor's Conscience and Prisoners' Defiance.- 7. Crime and Justice in a Sacred Landscape. Vienna, 1668-1786.- 8. Conclusion: The Decline of Suicide by Proxy and its Historical Effacement.
About the author
Kathy Stuart is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, USA.
Report
"Kathy Stuart has written an excellent study of suicide by proxy, a term she uses to refer to people who committed crimes, usually the killing of young children, with the intention of being executed. ... Stuart's most important contribution is her linking suicides by proxy to social discipline, which, historians agree, greatly increased among both Protestants and Catholics during the Reformation era. ... Stuart has ... produced an excellent piece of scholarship." (Jeffrey R. Watt, Austrian History Yearbook, March 11, 2024)
