‘He who kills himself liberates a wretch’: Abelard on Suicide

Abstract

Alexander Murray has written of non-suicidal 99.998 of population of Europe and the happy people in Middle Ages did not commit suicide. This chapter seeks to problematize idea that only those who either attempted or committed suicide in Middle Ages can provide us with an insight into what constituted 'suicidal' in this period. The chapter demonstrates that emotional conglomerations of feelings, outlooks, and behaviours broadly associated with an impulse towards self-destruction both existed and were expressed in Christian Middle Ages by individuals who did not lay hands upon themselves. Abelard's most complex and interesting examinations of suicidal emotions appear in his more personal writings from early 1130s, and this paper particularly considers his thousand-line poem of advice written for his son Astralabe: Carmen ad Astralabium , an open letter: Historia calamitatum , six poetic laments written for Heloise: Planctus . Keywords: Alexander Murray; Carmen ad Astralabium ; Heloise; Historia calamitatum ; lyric poetry; medieval Europe; Peter Abelard; Planctus