Suicide, law, and community in early modern Sweden

Abstract

Riikka Miettinen’s fine first book strikes a powerful blow to the ‘myth of early modern strong states’ (9). In legal historical circles, the early modern era is best known for its Judicial Revolution, which witnessed a transition from restorative justice administered locally and communally to a system based on retributive justice, imposed top-down by a centralized and bureaucratized state, and which employed an elite, university-educated judicature. What is at debate here is the extent to which this transition empowered the state and permitted control over its subjects and their values. While studies like Matthew Lockwood’s recent Conquest of Death: Violence and the Birth of the Modern English State see this transition as integral to the development of an authoritarian state controlling its population with an iron grip, Miettinen demonstrates the sheer impossibility of the ideal for the early modern Kingdom of Sweden. Not only was the kingdom sparsely populated, with 90% of its population living in isolated rural hamlets, it was a land of diversity. Including also Finland and Kexholm, the realm’s inhabitants were linguistically diverse (speaking Swedish, Finnish and Russian) and religiously diverse (Lutheran, eastern Orthodox and the animistic faith of the Sámi people). Miettinen uses the crime of suicide as a gateway to underscore just how local and communal justice continued to be during this crucial period. The bulk of the historical literature has focussed on attitudes towards suicide, and thus it is appropriate that Miettinen begins there with Chapter Two (the Introduction being Chapter One). Sweden was late to the game when it comes to the criminalization of suicide: it was not counted as such until the code known as King Christopher’s Law passed in 1442. As is typical across Europe, the law recommended shaming punishments imposed upon the corpse to draw attention to the felon’s outcast state. The nature of the penalty prescribed depended upon his or her peace of mind at the time of death: sane suicides were sentenced to