Pharmacie et médicament en Méditerranée occidentale (XIIIe–XVIe siècles)

is drawn precisely. This is the very model of scrupulous scholarship. Murray groups his suicide accounts according to the sources from which they are drawn. He systematically works his way through chronologies, judicial records and religious sources, subdividing each category as he goes. First, he examines chronicles of public figures and private individuals, town chronicles and chronicles of religious orders. Then, he investigates the legal documents: Eyre rolls, coroners' records and rolls of the King's Bench in England; French ecclesiastical and secular court rulings and the Parlement's Letters of Remission; and town judicial records from the Empire. Finally, he analyses biographies of saints (vitae), accounts of miracles (miracula), and stories told for the sake of moral instruction @xempla). Murray offers excellent descriptions of all these genres. This is important, he explains, because knowledge of the literary conventions involved helps us to appreciate how each suicide account has been shaped. Murray rightly reminds us of the methodological principle that these legal and literary records were not designed to record suicide cases for historical purposes. Instead, each case involves an intricate piece of historical reconstruction, in which the processes generating the suicide account are examined in an attempt to reach back to the historical event that stood behind it. The years of effort that went into this task have paid rich dividends. When all the necessary qualifications have been made, Murray is left with a database of 700 suicides, the details of which are summarized in a fifty-page Appendix. Three hundred and ten of these cases are recounted in the first fourteen chapters of the book. The final two chapters attempt to make statistical sense of this information, with calculations of the rate of suicide, the proportion of suicides to other homicides, and whether the rate of suicide increased in the sixteenth century. Information is also provided on the victims' gender, wealth, occupation, age, family status, and preferred method of suicide. Readers of this journal will be interested to know that Murray reports only one case of a medicus having attempted suicide. This was the Englishman Richard Blofot of Cheddestan who, having killed his wife and children, attempted to hang himself and was eventually imprisoned in Norwich in 1270 (p. 444). More importantly, Murray reports that physical ailment does not seem to have been a major cause of suicide, or at least this was not the sort of thing that the sources …