Author’s unpublished draft. Published draft here: http://www.maneyonline.com/toc/exm/26/1 1 ‘Unlocking the Silences of the Self-Murdered: Textual Approaches to Suicidal Emotions in the Middle Ages’, Exemplaria 26.1 (2014), 58-80. REBECCA F. MCNAMARA and JUANITA FEROS RUYS University of Sydney Abstract What emotions did people in the Middle Ages associate with suicide, and how did they react emotionally to the possibility or act of suicide? Although pre-modern Europe did not have a dedicated word to signify the concept of self-inflicted death, and although there is no evidence of suicide notes until the seventeenth century, we find in a range of medieval texts an interest in the act and attendant emotions of suicide. In this essay, we demonstrate how scholars might discover emotions related to suicide in two genres: English legal records and first-person life narratives. Through close attention to textual detail and recourse to wider cultural implications of emotionally meaningful contexts, we show that even the unlikeliest of texts can provide inroads to emotions related to medieval suicide. With these models we hope to encourage scholars to seek other genres and ways of reading that will help to unlock the silences of the self-murdered. Keywords suicide, emotions, medieval legal records, first-person life narratives, despair, sadness, illness As scholars have noted, “suicide” is not a medieval term. 1 That it is largely the invention of the early modern era eloquently expresses how great a distance lies between our current perceptions of the social contexts surrounding suicide and how the medieval world viewed those who took their own lives. How do we begin to explore something for which a culture itself does not have a name? And if the very idea is not fully conceptualized in its own time, how can we begin to unearth the emotions that were understood to be related to suicide in the pre-modern world? We maintain that even if the concept and action of self-killing had not been condensed into a single definitive term in the Middle Ages, suicide and the issues surrounding it were nonetheless subjects of concern. 2 Furthermore, although suicide was construed as a sinful act, 3 and sometimes characterized as being instigated by the Devil, 4 suicide was also understood as having an emotional impetus. In this essay, we present approaches to uncovering emotions related to suicide in the Middle Ages. As scholars interested in the history of emotions, we acknowledge that different cultures over time may produce distinctive key emotions and contexts related to suicide. 5 We can never know how people in the past felt, but we seek to discover the ways in which emotions