Committing suicide was deemed a felony for centuries in many parts of Europe, including the areas that are now Sweden and Finland. Suspected suicides and other suspicious deaths were investigated in the local lower courts of each rural district or town in the early modern Swedish Kingdom, and the penalties for suicide were inflicted on the corpse of the individual sentenced. The kin, friends and neighbours of the deceased, as well as vicars, local office-holders, judges and juries composed of peasant freeholders or burghers faced the difficult task of ascertaining what had happened and deciding on how to dispose of the corpse according to the law. This book explores the judicial treatment of suicides in early modern Sweden with a focus on the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and thus Swedenâs Great Power Era characterized by territorial expansion and warfare, state-building and the first stages of the so-called judicial revolution . According to the authorities, killing oneself was a grave sin and a felony punishable by degrading treatment of the corpse. However, despite this official condemnation, the reactions and attitudes towards suicide were far more diverse. I will discuss the complex criminal investigation and selective treatment of suicides at the local level and in the lower courts, highlighting intersectional approaches to the treatment of crimes and the pivotal role of local communities and their lay members in the enforcement of the law. The practices related to dealing with this relatively exceptional crime reveal interesting aspects about the functioning of the lower court and legal culture in a time characterized by a slow administrative and judicial transition from local justice to top-down, state-controlled expert judicature.
As is well known, suicide has become a classic topic in the field of social sciences and humanities, also intriguing historians especially since the 1980s. The rise in historical research on suicide is connected to the general developments in historiography, perhaps most importantly the attention given to the history of mentalities and the history of death as well as the shift in interest towards topics and persons previously neglected in traditional history-writing. 1 In the footsteps of Philippe AriĂšs and Michel Vovelle and their seminal works on attitudes towards death in the longue durĂ©e, historians have focused especially on attitudes towards self-inflicted death, discussing the intellectual and cultural history of suicide and in particular elite views of suicide. 2 Another strand in the field, in particular since the themes of social history and quantitative studies on mortality gained more ground, concerns the historical occurrence and phenomenon of suicide from different perspectives. 3 Some scholars have tried, for example, to trace historical roots and explanations for the high suicide rates in the modern Western world and to ascertain their origins and the cultural and social processes that could explain these developments. 4 However, the purpose of this book is not to attempt the impossible task of establishing early modern suicide rates , nor to research suicide as a phenomenon per se, but to examine the ways in which suicides were treated in the local community and in the lower courtsâthe first judicial instances and lowest, local levels of the secular judiciary, where offences like suicide were discussed. Like most other empirical studies concerning earlier centuries, this work has to rely on judicial documents, as they are virtually the only sources available recording suicides and the encounters between the law and the local communities.
The legal history of suicides has been well covered concerning most of Western and Central Europe, 5 and the legislation and judicial treatment of suicides have been studied perhaps most thoroughly concerning medieval and early modern England . 6 The official attitudes and authoritiesâ treatment of suicides have also been discussed, although to a lesser extent, in the early modern Swedish and Nordic context. 7 For example, as early as in 1861 a Finnish lawyer advocating the decriminalization of suicide, Robert Lagus, published a detailed article about the legislation on suicide, comparing the Swedish laws to those of other countries. 8 Indeed, most studies discussing the legal history of suicide have remained at the normative level, i.e. studying legislation and its evolution, or the crime rates and patterns of verdicts in early modern courts of law rather than the court procedures and trials themselves. Studies about the judicial practices and investigation of suicides in different types of courts of law combine the norms with the application of the law , revealing much more about the judicial treatment of suicides in the past. 9 This book, which draws on my recent doctoral dissertation, 10 focuses on the trials themselves, the very practical operations and interpretations of the lower courts and the local agency within them.
Research on the history of suicide in Scandinavia , as in southern and eastern Europe 11 and in particular concerning early modern times, is relatively scant. 12 A few studies have discussed the judicial investigations and court practices concerning suicide cases, although tending to focus more on sentencing patterns and Courts of Appeal than on suicide trials in the lower courts. 13 However, although both focus on the higher judicial tier in early modern Sweden, Bodil E.B. Perssonâs and Yvonne Maria Wernerâs studies on the investigation and sentencing of suicide cases provide especially useful points of comparison. Persson examined the penal practices of the Göta Court of Appeal and the lower court investigations of drownings in Scania in southern Sweden in the period between 1704 and 1718, while Werner studied the classifications and sentencing of suicide cases in the Göta Court of Appeal between 1695 and 1718. 14 However, most studies on suicide in early modern Sweden have focused on attitudes towards suicide. 15 This book continues these discussions while bringing to light new information on the investigations, classifications and sentencing of crimes of suicide and on the diverse views on suicide that manifested themselves in the selective treatment of such deaths within the communities and in the lower courts.
The setting of a vast, but sparsely populated and centralizing great power make the âSwedish caseâ distinct and fascinating when compared to most of the more urbanized and densely populated areas of Europe. After all, the typical Swedish hamlets and towns were miniscule compared to most of those in Western, Central and Southern Europe, and the reach of the central authorities was still limited, taking into consideration that the Swedish Kingdom, which reached its zenith in the mid-seventeenth century, was the third largest in Europe. Almost constant warfare led to expansions, especially in the first half of the century with the Baltic forming a bond between various widely dispersed dominions. Although serfdom persisted in some of the territories acquired, Sweden continued to be a society of four estates, with the nobility, clergy , burghers and peasants all represented in the Diet. The Kingdom and its inhabitants were relatively poor and the population remained sparse with an estimated 2.5 million people in the entire empire. At the turn of the eighteenth century, well over 90% of the population still resided in the countryside with most towns having fewer than 2000 inhabitants. In spite of regional differences, most of the area was characterized by great distances between towns and settlements and hence also between the administrative, central organs and the local institutions and lay office-holders. Sweden Proper (Egentliga Sverige), covering most of modern Sweden and Finland and comprising the territories that had been fully integrated into the Kingdo...