“Por la quoal cosa es dapnado”. Suicide and Accidental Death in Late Medieval Navarre

Abstract

Suicide was considered all along the Middle Ages an homicide, because the destruction of the sacred present of life and, therefore, the most offensive sin against God, creator of life. Consequently, suicides were subjected to the scorn of the community and suicide brought legal actions, with penalizations such as the confiscation of suicide’s properties and the humbling of their soul and body, hanging and mutilating the corpses and denniying ecclesiastical sepulture. Anyway, suicides commited under madness were not prosecuted. Official theories and regulations of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities were radically different because Church officials preferred to apply prevention methods as cathequesis and forgave and absolve the survivors. In Navarre the legal punishments were employed only by civil authorities because suicide was an act of felony, an offence against the Crown, and Church obeyed the King’s rules.