What Historians Talk About When They Talk About Suicide: The View from Early Modern British North America

This article surveys the historiography of suicide in the early modern West, with particular reference to England, Europe, and the British North American and Caribbean colonies. It examines the religious, legal and secular punishments for suicide in the early modern era, addresses the variations in these punishments among different regions and populations, including among the enslaved in early America, and traces the changes in punishments for self‐murder over the course of the eighteenth century. Suicide was viewed less and less as an act that required punishment from the church, state and the community. The emerging modern sensibility toward self‐murder, in contrast, emphasised the elimination of legal and religious penalties and the extension of sympathy and mercy toward suicides and their families.