The question mark in the title of R. A. Houston’s new book on suicide in early modern Britain offers us a clue as to how the author approaches his subject. His provocative work questions both the prevalence of older practices and our interpretations of their occurrence. The two quotations that appear at the beginning of the volume sharpen our sense of his mission. The one from F. W. Maitland expresses the belief that the study of Scotland might help one to understand England better. The other, from John Selden, says that you should not inquire into the reason of a thing “till you are sure the Thing it self be so” (xv). Houston argues that in our approach to suicide we have fundamentally misunderstood the phenomenon. Trapped by various teleological assumptions about the relation of past and present, we have misrepresented the nature of earlier practices. “Attitudes towards self-murder were complex and contingent throughout the early modern period,” Houston argues, “not simple and severe at one date and simple and benign at a later one” (210). Although the focus of his study is suicide, his ambition is to cast new light on early modern community, the importance of legal structures, and the relationship between Scottish and English cultural developments.

Houston’s book is grounded in a remarkable combing of the archives and a careful survey of the secondary literature. He demonstrates familiarity with sociological and anthropological theories and shows a willingness to engage them on their own terms. It is reflective of the ingenuity that Houston brings to his project that he transforms what might have seemed a liability, the absence of the coroners’ inquests that have formed the basis of most studies of English suicide, into an advantage. The richest source for a study of Scottish suicide consists of the records of forfeiture of goods, the seemingly most mundane penalty imposed upon self-killers. Houston worked patiently with this difficult and unpromising material, which he supplemented with an exhaustive examination of the legal literature on the subject. What he arrives at is an understanding of society’s reaction to suicide that upsets many of our settled assumptions. Most historians, Houston argues, have been so transfixed by the savagery of the measures imposed by law or custom upon the bodies of suicides that they fail to look more carefully at the contexts within which they occur. In both England and Scotland, the law declared that the goods of a suicide were forfeited to the crown. Critics charged that the measure typified the irrationality and cruelty that they took to characterize all of society’s ways of dealing with suicide. It punished the innocent by depriving families of subsistence.

In looking at how forfeiture actually operated, Houston arrives at a very different conclusion. Forfeiture, he argues, was an aspect of lordship; it represented a declaration of authority within a community. While it involved a claim to money, Houston discovers that fiscal motives were a weak influence on how the penalty actually operated. The crown was more often interested in the assertion of a right than in the gain that might result. It often granted the claim away. Forfeiture formed one more link in the patronage networks that governed early modern society. However severe the penalty might look in theory, in practice little was usually demanded of the family of the suicide. Indeed, Houston wants to argue that the practice served the needs of restoring the community more than penalizing individuals. When he turns to England, Houston discovers much the same tale. The legal culture was different, but the actual operation of forfeiture was governed by the same considerations of justice, compromise, and charity. The almoner’s function “was primarily to ensure the orderly and equitable handling of a suicide’s affairs” (119). “Hardly anybody,” Houston concludes at one point, “in the historic past thought suicide the right way to die but, in treating suicides as people, the sharp edges of law and religion were rounded off by a palpable and enduring practicality and humanity” (75). When change came, it was less a product of spreading civility than a consequence of the transformation of legal institutions that acted to limit the scope for personal influence or discretion. As Houston says at one point, “over time, Scot’s law on attempted suicide became clearer, but neither more ‘severe’ nor more ‘lenient’” (277).

In the second half of his book, Houston turns to the practices and attitudes that have formed the more familiar subjects of most earlier studies of suicide. He examines the treatment of the suicide’s body as well as the attitudes displayed toward the act in the press of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. He reminds us that in contrast to forfeiture, the penalties imposed on the body were governed by local custom rather than law. Once again what Houston discovers is variety and less brutality than is usually suggested. Staking and burial at the crossroads were not nearly so frequent as supposed. Often it was only the poor or outcast who suffered this fate. Once again, discretion and selection marked society’s response to the act.

Houston is skeptical of employing grand narratives such as secularization or modernization to explain change. In particular, he targets the volume that has had the greatest influence on historians’ view of suicide, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990), by Michael MacDonald and Terence Murphy. Houston scarcely misses an opportunity to fault the book for small sins and large. He criticizes their generalization from the English case, their conclusions drawn from a survey of the press, and their characterization of early modern belief about the influence of the devil in promoting self-killing. “To claim that early modern suicide,” Houston writes in a characteristic gesture, “was seen in ‘primarily supernatural’ terms is far to exceed the evidence” (323). In a revealing remark, Houston says at one point that “attitudes did not change from harshness to leniency between the early sixteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century, but manifested varying forms of ambivalence” (372). One does not need to agree with all of Houston’s conclusions about the folly of proposing theories of historical change to acknowledge that he has initiated a debate very much worth having.