“Suicide by proxy” refers to a largely unexplored crime in early modern Central Europe and Scandinavia. Suicidal individuals committed capital crimes with the purpose of bringing about their own death by execution, to avoid eternal damnation that befell direct suicides. Suicidal murderers hoped that their deaths at the hands of the state in highly ritualized religious execution ceremonies would expedite their entry into paradise. In its most visible form, suicide by proxy involved the murder of a young child, sometimes framed as a religious sacrifice. Suicide by proxy was a widespread practice. In many jurisdictions, suicide by proxy resulted in a greater number of executions than the extensively studied European witch-hunt or prosecutions of unwed mothers for neonaticide. The crime emerged in the late sixteenth century. Murders continued into the early nineteenth century. Kathy Stuart coined the phrase “suicide by proxy” to emphasize the transactional nature of these crimes, and the porous boundaries of the early modern self that they reveal.

Sources on suicide by proxy are drenched in emotions, from the cloyingly sentimental media representations that lamented the death of the innocent child victim in images and texts to the execution sermons that narrated the collaborative performances by clergyman and condemned murderer, culminating in the “poor sinner’s” demonstration of virtuoso repentance and joyous death on the scaffold, reflecting pity with the murdered child and its killer. Trials records are a singularly rich source. Relatively brief in the late sixteenth century, the records expanded to hundreds of pages by the eighteenth century, documenting trials that lasted many months. Prosecutors focused on the motives, passions and interior life of perpetrators, as they assessed intent and criminal culpability. Numerous researchers, notably on the European witch-hunt, have mined criminal trial records as sources for the history of emotions, selfhood and subjectivity, despite the fact that these sources were produced in the most coercive possible context, since judicial torture was routinely employed. Suicide by proxy trials, by contrast, generally unfolded without torture. Nor did interrogators impose an elite narrative on defendants, as they often did in witch trials. Perpetrators of suicide by proxy appeared unbidden at courthouses and essentially “unloaded” their deepest emotional problems on flummoxed interrogators. Fulsome judicial confessions figured in perpetrators’ salvations strategies, a secular parallel to the religious confession they would make to clergymen who prepared them for death. The killers’ motives and emotional states were central to the trial, since they determined the criminal culpability of the murderers, some of whom were condemned for extraordinary malice and treachery, while others received an insanity defense (against their will).

This panel brings together researchers working in early modern Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Finland, in Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed regions. Suicide by proxy was a malleable practice that evolved over time. Perpetrators adapted to changing local social, religious and judicial circumstances. The comparative perspective provided in this panel will illuminate variants of the crime in different regions and the changing emotional norms they reveal.