Suicide and the secularization of the body in early modern Saxony

A jurisdictional dispute over the burial of suicides in Electoral Saxony in the years 1702-1706 brought into sharp contrast conflicting views of the b ody in popular belief and Lutheran pastoral theology, and in the secularizi ng project of the early Enlightenment. The dispute centred on the practical , local implications of territorialism, a theory of church subordination to the state developed in the 1690s by the Saxon jurist Christian Thomasius ( 1655-1728), the most influential German political philosopher of the early Enlightenment. Considered in its intellectual and institutional contexts, t he Saxon dispute illustrates the importance of the body to an understanding of secularization, the early Enlightenment and the history of suicide.