It is also impossible to calculate a suicide rate for early modern western Europe. The difficulties with identifying modern victims of suicide come into play--people who try to cover up their own actions, families who don't report it. For the early modern era, the usual problem with surviving sources compounds these problems exponentially.

But it's also harder because of much darker cultural beliefs about suicide. It was a matter of deep social shame for the survivors and the memory of the victim. It was a legal crime that punished survivors through state seizure of the victim's property. And in Christianity, it was a sin that sent one's soul straight to hell.

This was true on all sides of the Reformation. In Catholicism, suicide offered no time for repentance between act and death. According to Protestant beliefs, suicide was an act of the reprobate.

So with so much societal push against suicide, combined with the usual narratives of the early modern era as the "rise of social discipline," who would get to the point of actively trying to kill themselves? Through the difficulties in the sources, one thing has stood out in multiple studies.

Suicide was often, though obviously not always, a sin and a crime of social and economic outcasts. People who perceived they had nowhere to turn or would have nowhere to turn in the future; people who faced a really awful future.

Legal records are where most of our data on suicide in early modern Europe comes from--actual court cases, records of deaths in a city, investigations of violent death and accidents in general. But studies of England and northern Germany show some of the problems with using these records straightforwardly.

First, it's generally considered fact that people sought desperately to cover up the suicidal death of a family member for three reasons: their own social shame, refusal of Christian burial rites, and seizure of property. In England, laws mandating almoners and coroners investigate all suspicious deaths were codified around 1500, which you would think would eliminate some of the chances of a cover-up.

But as R. A. Houston showed for 16th century England, cases taken to the courts often ended up more as a mediation in how to divide a deceased person's assets than outright forfeiture. And they might not end up in court until decades after a death. At the same time, there's plenty of evidence of families indeed trying to cover up someone's suicide. And people who committed suicide themselves might also have taken care. So we're definitely still dealing with very selective reporting and recording.

In northern Germany and Scandinavia, so-called "suicidal murder" became a major problem in the 16th-18th centuries. This involved a person who despaired to the point of suicide actually murdering someone else, a victim and in a manner that made capital punishment inevitable (usually a child not related to them). Arne Jansson traced this horror to a local folk belief that a violent death of any kind--including execution--sent one to heaven. This would presumably constitute a small number of cases of suicide overall. But it's a useful, if tragic, reminder that suicide doesn't always look like "suicide."

And of course, a major difficulty is that sources don't always agree--and that they disagree in really significant ways. Through 1646, Laura Cruz observed 38 suicides recorded in court records for Leiden; Jeffrey Watts observed 41 in Geneva through 1650. This seems quite ordinary until you realize that Leiden was about twice the size of Geneva.

However, Cruz and Watts found agreement in their sources on a crucial point: suicide was overwhelmingly an act of the socially marginalized. Cruz observes a strong link between economic difficulties and suicide. Even as Leiden prospered dramatically, not everyone came along. Those excluded from guild membership as temporary workers (the adjunct professors of early modern trades, if you will) or those still trying to earn their way in as apprentices (the grad students) constituted 20% of the people "convicted" of committing suicide in court records.

Feeling a full sense of belonging and community in a church was also insulation from actually committing suicide, although there is no information on attempts. Cruz found only 2 cases out of 38 who were full members of a Calvinist or Anabaptist church (about 40% of the population overall).

For Geneva, on the other hand, Watt identified surprisingly specific groups as those most likely to commit suicide: suspected witches, prisoners, and people previously considered violently insane. 9 out of the 41 pre-1650 victims of suicide had been accused or suspected of witchcraft.

Studying England, Houston cautions that the predominance of social outcasts in statistics about people who committed suicide, likely reflects source bias to some extent. MacDonald and Murphy in Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England highlight the presence of nobles and wealthier burghers among the registers of suicide victims. But they still point out that based on assets uncovered for forfeiture, more than half of victims of suicide would qualify as poor or destitute.

Sharon Strocchia, meanwhile, studied suicides and suicide attempts among nuns in early modern Italy--what more tight-knit community than a convent? It's impossible to reconstruct the complex social, medical, and personal reasons that any one person committed suicide. But looking at the circumstances of these nuns, she detected two patterns at work in many (not all) cases. First, some of the nuns were noted as suffering horrible verbal and even physical abuse. (And this does not seem to have been an exaggeration--one nun, who reported the suicide of her sister to local authorities, also sought permission to transfer to another convent because of the terrible environment.) Second, many nuns who attempted suicide, or had sisters desperately concerned that they would, were among those forced into monastic life by relatives. In both those cases, there was sharp displacement from these women's desired community, whether that was within the convent or outside.

And Houston offers a poignant reminder that "social outcast" could come in many forms. From 17th century Shropshire (the year isn't clear), a man named John Gossage committed suicide by taking arsenic. He had spent time in jail for counterfeiting money and was accounted an alcoholic by survivors. When his body was found, the only person the town could find to deal with his burial was his landlord.

And the nameless woman who threw herself into the Nor Loch in Edinburgh in 1665? She was buried right next to where she drowned herself--she had no family or friends to claim, move, or take care of her body. We only know her from a brief reference in the city treasurers' records of the need to supply a coffin.

I have an earlier answer on suicide in the Middle Ages in western Europe. If you don't mind, I'll copy-paste it here for now so people have something to read while I work on one that extends into the Reformation/later Renaissance era. (Normally I'd just wait, but the topic seems to demand it.) (Now posted!)

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I'm borrowing some pieces from earlier answers here and here, but it's mostly new.

It's impossible to calculate the rate at which medieval people in the Latin West killed themselves or tried to. First, for the usual reasons--lack of records, bias of records that do survive in favor of focus on specific groups, the sketchily-drawn nature of calculating medieval demographics in general. Equally important, however, are the immense social, legal, and Christian religious consequences not just for the ones who killed themselves, but for those staring numbly at their loved one's body. While we can't say "how commonly did medieval people kill themselves," it is evident that suicide was not only a common problem for survivors, but became an even bigger emotional burden over the course of the Middle Ages.

The central drumbeat of any examination of suicide in the Christian Middle Ages must be: suicide was a sin. And not just any sin, but an absolutely, fundamentally unforgiveable one. It was understood that the act of self-murder was the last thing that a person would do; there was no time for confession and absolution. No cleansing purgatorial fire awaited those who killed themselves: they were eternally bound to hell. As early as 570, Gregory of Tours writes that the body of a nobleman who had killed himself was taken to a monastery by his survivors, but the monks could "not put [him] among the Christian dead, and no Mass was sung for him." The refusal of burial with the Christian community in consecrated ground is an earthly symbol of the theological belief that the count was separated from the Christian community in the afterlife.

This story shows us two further things. First, the intimate relationship of suicide and death means the theology of suicide was doctrine that wrapped itself around every level of Christian society. Even if not every single person over a thousand year span was excited to hear every last sermon or could recite the Paternoster (prayer) without prompting at their goddaughter's baptism, everyone dealt with death, whose aftermath was the domain of God and the Church.

Second, it shows the desperation of the count's family. They still took his body to the monastery even knowing he had killed himself, holding out some shard of hope for his soul, that the holy men might still be able to help. Already in the earliest years of the Middle Ages, we witness the desperation of the survivors.

The fallout of this desperation--even a generalized sadness of pious writers upset at the consignment of any soul to hell--permeates the medieval source record on suicide. As with Gregory, it's not that suicide isn't mentioned. We hear about it in monastic chronicles: a 12th century monk and prior of Le Dale monastery named Henry fell in love with a local woman and, officially absent from his house to earn money for it, moved in with her. When his affair was discovered and he was forced to return to the convent, "Taking guidance from the Devil he got into a hot bath and opened veins in both arms; and by way of spontaneous, or rather foolish, death he put an end to life." From late medieval England, we have cases mentioned in coroners' rolls: A man sentenced to sit in the stocks overnight is found dead in the morning, having stabbed himself.

Miracle stories attached to saints and shrines describe people who attempted suicide, maybe even appeared to have killed themselves, but were (literally) miraculously revived: a young woman was raped repeatedly by her uncle, who forced her to have an abortion each time she became pregnant. The third time, she did so directly, by ripping open her stomach with a knife. But when she cried to the Virgin Mary--here as both mother and mediatrix--Mary healed her external as well as internal wounds, and the woman took vows in a Cistercian convent to spend the rest of her days in praise of Mary/out of sight of mainstream society. And fictional literary sources talk of suicide, too: Boccaccio's Elegy of Lady Fiammetta describes a woman who decides to kill herself by jumping from a tower, because the people who find her body won't be able to tell whether it was suicide or an accident.

But in these stories, a clear pattern emerges: an emphasis on secrecy, privacy, and shame. A traveler who drops back from the group; a nun who barricades herself into a room for "private prayer" but slips out the window. Fiammetta (who is ultimately rescued) wanted to camouflage her death as an accident; the noblewoman in Gerard of Frachet's miracle tale hid herself away in the aftermath.

This only increases as one moves up the social scale in considering cases. Although typically we'd say the source record is radically denser for religious and the upper class than the small but growing middle class and peasants, with suicide this is not so. Alexander Murray, who composed the most important study of suicide in the Middle Ages (and to give you an idea of the weight of this project: he only ever made it through two volumes of a planned three before it was too much), instead says we must look to "whispers".

The sources ideologically and personally closest to a named noble or royal will shy away from mentioning suicide or suicidal ideation; those further removed in time and alliance will be less reticent. One example of this in operation is the possible attempted suicide of Henry IV, 11th (mostly) century Holy Roman Emperor. A lot of chronicles discuss his wars with the pope and his own son. But it is only one account, by known opponent Bernold of Constance, who includes this detail:

He betook himself to a castle and there remained without any regal trappings. He was in a state of extreme dejection and, as they say, he tried to give himself over to death, but was prevented by his men and could not bring his wish to effect. (trans. Murray)

While the modern reader will recongize circumstances of deep depression and suicidal desire that feel all too familiar, there is an even darker angle in play. A given "mental illness" is of course a name attached of a web of symptoms that frequently travel together, manifesting slightly differently in all cases; but even the concept of illness is a cultural-scientific attachment. Tristitia, acedia, melancholia, and their fellows in medieval writings appear to aligns with different manifestations of what we call major depressive disorder today. But in the Middle Ages, they were sins. Even before one stepped onto the tower window ledge or threw the rope over the rafters, sorrow over worldly matters like your own son leading an armed rebellion against you, nbd was a sin that divorced you from other people and from God. It's not an accident that so many accounts of suicide attribute the act to possession by the devil or the influence of demons, and describe the victim's diabolical fear or behavior in the days or years beforehand.

It's no wonder, then, that even an anti-Henry partisan like Bernold can only bring himself to write "As they say" (aiunt). It's a common pattern. Dante Alighieri refused to identify thirteenth-century king Henry Hohenstaufen as one of the inmates of the seventh circle of hell in Inferno, despite rumors to the effect he was among those violent against themselves. It's not agreement or disagreement with this decision that is picked up by commentators, it's the debate: "but others write," hedges Bevenuto da Imola, and "if this is true."

There was good reason for those left behind to be cautious. As laws and legal systems coalesced over the course of the Middle Ages, death by suicide came to have extensive legal consequences for one's heirs (and whatever a grudge against the dead, might not be good to antagonize the living). Laws permitted or mandated the "ravage" of the property of someone who committed suicide: that its, its seizure by the lord or city rather than passing down to one's heirs. This could extend all the way to the home that a house-owner's family was still living in, throwing them onto the street.

A 1280 case from England illustrates these laws in action. Upon the death of one of his tenants, a lord had claimed it was suicide and thus her property reverted to him. Her heirs had sued to get the property back, claiming his "presumptions" were (a) wrong and (b) even if they were right, presumptions weren't strong enough to be evidence of suicide. Notably, the judge ruled in the lord's favor because one of the 'presumptions' was the dead woman's threat to do something to shame her friends. Suicide was shameful for the immediate victim, but it also smade victims of the survivors who had to deal with public shame and material loss in the midst of private grief.

As a follow up question: why was the punishment for suicide so harsh and why did it get harsher over time? Why did it extend to living relatives? Wasn't eternity in purgatory punishment enough? Was it just about money - i.e. seizing the property of the suicidee?