Medieval Torture with Dana Schwartz
00:00I should start writing travel journalism and showing up and asking people abouttorture devices that existed almost 300 years ago. That would be a fun way to see Indianapolis.Welcome to You're Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall and today we are learning about medievaltorture. We are joined today by our wonderful guest Dana Schwartz who has been with us manytimes. We've talked to her about Catherine the Great. We've learned from her about Marie Antoinette,about Anastasia and one of the themes in our episodes with her is that our popular conceptionof history may be not entirely right and you will be shocked that this comes up again today.And in a broader sense, we're going to talk about the way that we throughout time have looked
00:56toward history and tried to tell a story about how whoever went before us was somehow different,how people who lived before we were around were worse or less intelligent or just simply somehownot recognizably human the way that we are. And one of the themes whenever Dana comes on the showis that people just keep making the same mistakes over and over which is disappointing in many ways.But in a way, maybe here also not because we can look into any stage of the past and recognizeourselves. And I like that. I like that about when Dana comes to talk to us. So I hope this episodeis a fun and illuminating one for you. I hope your inner 11 year old has a good time as well.And I guarantee this is less scary than the email one.
01:57Welcome to your wrong about the podcast where sometimes we go to the Middle Ages.And with us today is Dana Schwartz. Hello. Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited.I mean, you can tell that I'm obviously like already chomping at the bit, so to say. Yes.You and I both I think around history have the energy of like just a really excitable 12 yearold on a class trip and simultaneously a public intellectual is the goal here. But like justthat pure enjoyment of being talking about this period just makes me so happy. I'm going to do athrow forward and say I'm actually chomping at the scolds bridle.And Dana, you do a little bit of history talking. Tell us about your podcast.
02:45Yeah, I have a podcast called noble blood where actually for I think our 50th episode,we did a little myth buster spectacular and briefly talked about medieval torture devices.So it's just a thrill to be able to really dive into detail about all the ways peopleget wrong when they talk about the past. But yeah, listen to noble blood wherever you youget your podcasts. If you want true stories of historical royals, follow me on the internet,Dana Schwartz with three Z's and pick up a book I wrote called anatomy a love story.And that's all the plugs. So there's more to listen to when you're done with this episode.Yeah. Oh, I get so excited about historical misconceptions. It's like I get to feel like
03:27Sherlock Holmes, but without any of the physical danger. So we are talking todayabout medieval torture, which I feel like doesn't really explain the giddiness in my voice. ButI'm going to give a little bit of a preamble and kind of set up why I brought you in and thenyou're going to take us on this on this ride. But so I have a vivid memory of when I was 11 or 12,my family went to Sydney. And we went to what I for many years that was Madame Tussauds,but it actually was the King's Cross Wax Museum. An off brand Madame Tussauds. Right.And I know that Madame Tussauds also has a rich history of morbid wax works, but I haven't seenthem yet. So the King's Cross Wax Museum had an exhibit of medieval torture devices and obviously
04:18as a middle schooler, I was extremely fascinated by this. And honestly, I think it's what I mostremember of all of Sydney, one of our world's great cities. So that's worrying. And then Iread a couple of years ago is kind of in passing that our ideas about medieval torture,or specifically I was reading about the Iron Maiden and just this kind of snippet about howthe Iron Maiden was kind of from my understanding, and you're going to tell us the real version,but my understanding of it is that the Iron Maiden was like kind of invented as a concept byVictorians. So they could be like people in the Middle Ages were really silly, but not us. We'revery intelligent and rational. We Victorians. So that feels like it might undermine the entire
05:02concept of the Middle Ages as a time when everyone was just torturing each other.The idea of the Dark Ages itself was invented so that people after it could be like, we'reenlightened. They were the Dark Ages. And then I feel like torture devices are sort ofthen a perfect synecdoche of that. I'm not using that word correctly, but like an example of thatin the sense that like, they're a perfect microcosm of that bigger idea where it's like, oh,look at this dumb stuff that they used to do that we don't do because we're not brutal. And also,I mean, the same thing that you're remembering about your trip to Sydney, that it was fun andmemorable and enthralling, is the reason that the idea of medieval torture devices exist today
05:49in the first place, they truly are an invention for museums. And wax museums. And wax museums. Tostart off, I'm going to send you a video. It's a BuzzFeed video. They're not like particularlywell vetted necessarily. Like I think the quality of BuzzFeed fact checking, like as we know,compared to like BuzzFeed news, there were like a lot of great journalists doing good work,where this feels like it's on the other side where it's just like someone who is probablyunderpaid and who's, you know, work, they're not getting the rights to churned this out withoutdoing a ton of insight or research. It's almost like how like an opinion section of a paper iscompletely separate from news because I've in the past written for BuzzFeed and been fact checked
06:38to Helen Beck. And then you have these other things that are just likelisticles where as a layperson, you can identify a couple of errors all at once.Absolutely. And this is like the worst example of it where the purpose of this video is to beinflammatory, to be heavily shared, almost everything about it is incorrect. There's,I would argue, maybe not a sentence that is correct.All right, let's do it. Three, two, one, go. Play.Skulls bridle, punishment for gossip, nagging, cursing, unwanted talking, okay,spiked plate projected into the mouth. And look at this, the video itself, I think if you could
07:19describe it's like trying to get your attention like black and white flashing. We have the rack,which I remember from the Kings Cross wax museum and a lot of Monty Python sketches about theclassic. How nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. No. Yeah. And we're playing,what I would describe is rights free metal. Rights free metal. Oh, the iron maiden so gruesome,it was thought it must be fictional, but it's real. Paravanguish. Ooh. Okay. Okay, this one was inSaw. This was in Saw 7, the brazen bull. This was in Saw 7. I've only seen a few of the saws.Saw 7 is bizarrely the only one of the saw movies that I feel like is kind of gross in its attitudestoward women. The other movies are fully about torturing straight white men. And I think that's
08:11really revolutionary for a film series. Okay. So what's your impression of that video?Oh my God, orally, I cannot do justice. But basically it's like,again, it is the kind of thing I would have loved when I was 11. I feel like we're also going to beunpacking through this whole conversation what it means to be attracted to morbid orviolent or creepy stuff in the way that middle schoolers are in a way that I thinkI still am when I do things like watch the Saw movies where there's this some kind of,I don't know, I think people often correlate tweens being interested in scary stuff to themnot being fully developed empathetically. And I think that's true. And I think also that tweendom
08:51is like an incredibly anxious time when you don't have control over your life. And I havehave a theory that there's a correlation between horror fans and people with anxiety.Yeah, this is perfect for tweens to share. It's about five medieval torture devices each morehorrible than the last and like, they've queued the music and the text. It's this video's from2013. And to me, it's very like pivot to video on Facebook, like it's easily shareable. Basically,if you Google medieval torture devices, the internet is just full of listicles like this inevery way shape and form like with not a lot of critical thought applied to each one and theyall sort of just recycle the same information. Yeah, it's the same drive that that makes us read
09:34morbid Wikipedia articles or one of my perennial favorite Wikipedia pages, which is inventorskilled by their own inventions, which some people say the brazen bull was one of them.I mean, if it was in saw, like how could it not be historically accurate? I don't know, Dana.Absolutely. Well, are you ready to dive into some quote unquote medieval torture devices?Yes. I think the first thing that I want to make clear is the idea of the brazen bullmaybe actually existed. But it wasn't medieval. That's the main thing I think I want to say. Alot of times things just get couched into medieval torture devices without an understanding of whenthe medieval period was. Maybe we could start with that. When was the medieval period and what,
10:22in fact, was it? Yeah, so the medieval period is a long period that historians sometimes divideinto the early high Middle Ages and then late Middle Ages. It's from about 476 AD, which wasthe fall of Rome. And then most historians, I mean, again, historians love to disagree aboutwhen ages start and finish. But usually it sort of ends with the age of discovery. So like the1492 era or a little earlier. So think of it from the mid 400s to the mid 1400s, like a goodthousand years. And in between that thousand years, we have what's considered the early Middle Ages,which is like Byzantine, Charlemagne, if that helps like orient you, the high Middle Ages,which is like the year 1000, which is like Chaucer and the Crusades and like these little
11:17nation states around Europe and like also the Eastern Orthodox Church breaking from the CatholicChurch. And then the late Middle Ages, which is like 1100 to 1450, the Black Death and thePapal Shism. So when we're talking about the medieval period, that's a big stretch of time,but about that. It's like trying to talk about 2020. It's like, do we mean March of 2020 orDecember? They're extremely different. Totally different. But for context, the Brazen Bull iswritten about in like the year 200 AD, a Christian apologist writes about it in a letter to themartyrs and like a theologian Augustine of Hippo, who again is from like 400 AD. There are two sourcesdescribing how a Roman general named Marcus Attilius Regulus was tortured by the Carthaginians in
12:12250 BC. Were they in the room? They weren't. But they're hearing these stories 500 years. So peoplein 200 AD, 450 years earlier, heard about a guy being tortured 250 years before the birth of Christ.I mean, when I'm degossipping with you about something that happened in the year 1522,I'm usually pretty accurate in my facts. Yeah. So again, like maybe the Brazen Bull was real.Maybe it was like a story of a Christian martyr because those are historical stories that existed.We have these sources. Maybe it happened. Maybe it didn't. But again, not even close to the medievalperiod. Right. But it's like, it's olden times. Hundreds of hundreds of years.When we're saying, talking about the Brazen Bull, to me, the point is not like
13:05this never happened. This never was used. It's that if we're telling a story about history,we're like in the Middle Ages, people were just constantly placing each other inWeber grills, basically, and then burning each other to death. And it was just a thing peopledid, and they loved it. It's like, okay, somebody doing something like this one time, or someonein the history of humanity doing this torture method, maybe. That still doesn't create a worldwhere people in the Middle Ages were just kind of ornately torturing each other all day long.Because again, that makes us look too good. And the video starts off being like,do you think your life is hard? The Middle Ages were worse. And it's like,
13:50no, our lives are really hard. We should focus on that.Yeah. Well, again, a few things I want to flag about the idea of the Brazen Bull.One, people in the ancient times did torture and hurt people. They crucified people, which is likefamously happened to Jesus. Famously crucified people. I remember being like a little Jewishkid and hearing about what crucifixion was and thinking that that was the worst thing physicallypossible. But again, the stories of the Brazen Bull, which is, if you're unfamiliar, I guess it'slike a metal thing shaped like an animal, a bull, and you're put inside it and then put on a fire,and then you bellow, then when, I guess, when it heats up, it makes a noise like a bellowing.
14:33I think we're uniquely drawn to people doing innovation in torturing. Because people burnedpeople at the stakes, I mean, through the 1600s, much more recently, people were actually burningpeople. But this, because it's like a device, I think that's why it gets put in listicles.Right. Because you're not going to read a listicle that's like 10 historical people who got burnedto death. Yeah. What are we drawn to about that? That's really interesting. And if you're readingthe history of, you know, we used to burn people, it's like, oh, that's really depressing. Andall there is to think about really is what it would like to be burned. Yeah, there's no whimsy to it.There's no saw whimsy to it. I know the thing about saw is that I'm so happy. Of course,
15:20saw is relevant here. But I could talk so much about saw, and I have. You are good. But themovies progress. And the traps that we see people in get both extremely more ornate. And also,we see the people in them get less and less thoughtful about it to where you're in likenumber six. And you're like, we're just supposed to be rooting for the trap at this point. Like,we're going to show in a bunch of people who are told they have to cut off a pound of their ownflesh. And no one thinks to put their clothes on the on the scale, you know, that's positioningus on the side of the torture machine in a very interesting way.I think throughout the course of this episode, I hope we'll knock off all five of those BuzzFeed
16:05listicles. The first one is the brazen bull if it ever existed was torture, although more execution.Yeah, that's a distinction was not medieval by any stretch of the definition at all. It wassquarely within the ancient world 250 years before the birth of Christ. The idea of the middleages themselves is obviously something that only exists in retrospect, like no one knowsthat they're living in any age as they're living in it. But basically, the idea of the medievalperiod being characterized as sort of what we think of today as like ignorance and superstitioncame about during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment because they were excited aboutthe Renaissance and Enlightenment and needed that to exist in contrast to something which was what
16:53they characterized as a period where people put their entire life and faith in the church,you know, the Catholic Church. And as such, there was no literacy and there was no independentthought and there was no art or math. You know, it was just a wasteland. It was just a thousandyears of, I guess, farmers digging holes for no reason and mud pits and people torturing eachother. You've seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail flinging mud around, you know.That's exactly what I think what people just picture for a thousand years.Bring out your dad. And also, it's very funny to think about these like Renaissance, you know,Age of Exploration types, you know, sailing around, committing genocide, being like those
17:38idiotic middle-aged type people and they were torturing each other the whole time.We're very smart. We don't torture anymore. Not other white people. Well, not other rich whitepeople. Well, some other rich white people, but not a lot of them. Just if they're the wrongreligion. Yes. I also think medieval historians are by and large just the best subgroup of peopleon the Internet. They spend their entire days, it seems, just like sighing with being like,no, things happened. Things happened that we study. There's a big misconception, first of all,because there was sort of by and large like a culture of illiteracy across Western Europewith most of the literacy concentrated in church institutions like monasteries,
18:24which a lot of medieval monks were doing a lot of important writing and creating a lot ofimportant art. But I do think that paradigm associates illiteracy with being stupid ina way that doesn't track where a lot of information was just transmitted orally and recited throughmemory. There was a transition of oral storytelling and minstrels performing epic poetry over thespan of days. And I think being like, oh, those stupid idiots didn't know how to write it downis not the best way to look at history. I feel like a middle-aged person would probably look at meand be like, so you can't remember anything you've thought or done today unless you go like thisand then you put it in a log that the entire world can see and then you can remember all
19:14your jokes. That's embarrassing. I go back through my own tweets to be like, yeah, I did watch thatmovie. I would connect that even to a much more recent tradition of the protest song. Why wasPete Seeger a songwriter? I'm sure probably because he liked it and he was good at it,but also because how do we transmit messages about workers' rights and socialism? We make songsand people can learn songs and sing songs together. The written word is the only or superior methodfor transmitting information is very dangerous. And just dangerous to think that people weredumber inherently because they didn't know how to read. No, they had different methods of communicationand history and storytelling that doesn't necessarily mean that they were all just ignorant
20:09mud folk. Even if you are thinking the only things that were happening were agricultural,which isn't true, there was a lot of innovation in the agricultural space during this period.There's the invention of the heavy plow, which was a huge revolution in agriculture.They start using horse collars, which they place around horses' necks because horses work betterthan oxen they realize in certain tasks. But even if you are thinking like, no, no,the only type of sophistication I value is beautiful art for its own sake. There was adiscovery right before World War I. I'm trying to open the chat so I can show you. There it is.Okay, I'm opening. Oh, we're going. Oh, yeah. So we're looking at
21:02engraved belt buckles and also an engraved, the thing that would be at the top of a coin purse,like a basically like a satchel that was a clasp. The only word for this is extra.They're gorgeous. There was a really important discovery sort of at the turn of World War IIcalled Sutton Hoo, which is in East Anglia in England, which was a big burial mound.And this is from the early Middle Ages, like 400 something.It's amazing. The purse lid that you're looking at was from Constantinople.Like there was, you know, international trade and the belt buckle was like,it's like beautiful craftsmanship. It looks like gold and it's like a clotta ring, but
21:47like a Mecca clotta ring, like it's like the amount, it's just this huge, complicated,not rendered in precious metal. It's incredible. Like I've never seen anything like it.And again, this was discovered within the last 100 years. And I think it's enlightening aboutwhat life was like for, you know, the Anglo-Saxon tribes before England became England, you know,back in 400 AD in a way that I think if people saw it would fundamentally disrupthow they pictured those tribes. You really don't picture people having a lot of glamin 400 AD is the thing. Yeah. I also remember my mom is a big Simon Shama stand. So we watcheda history of Britain. And there's a section about just, you know, I'm going to get all of this wrong,
22:39but a place where people lived at, you know, I don't know, probably around the year zerobetween then and this belt buckle around that very long era. And just the reconstruction of like,this is what the bedding would have been like, and you would have had like animal skins. And,you know, just this is what the house was like, pretty nice house, right? And just the fact that,I don't know, yeah, I think something very dangerous happens when we don't think of peoplethroughout history as having like different abilities to get it, but like the same basicneeds and desire for like a place that's not only comfortable, but like cute, like we've alwayswanted to be cute. I think that's very important. So I also think the Petrarch, like the, you know,
23:23big historical source of so many things in the 1330s is the first one I think who most historiansdescribe to him calling the medieval period the Dark Ages. But I also think it's important torecognize how Western European centric that framing also is, because over in the Islamic world,huge and important things were happening. The invention of algebra and the quadratic equation,there's this Persian astronomer named Al-Quar- I don't want to pronounce this right. MuhammadAl-Quar-Izmi, and he was born in 780, just like 780. In the 12th century, his work is translatedinto Latin, and that's what gives us the word algorithm. So he invented YouTube. Yeah, heinvented YouTube and TikTok. Somebody had to. Yeah. Wow. So there were a lot of exciting mathematical
24:20things happening throughout the world. I mean, and also it's, yeah, it's important to point out thatwhen we're talking about the Middle Ages, I think that both refers primarily to Western Europe,if not entirely, right? And it kind of, it does a disservice to everyone, right? Because if we'relike the Middle Ages, you know, the peasants caked in mud and, you know, eating whatever,more mud, I don't know, mud with mud seasoning, it's like, not only does that discredit theWestern Europeans who you're actually bothering to think about, but then everyone else just doesn'texist in the entire world during that period in that worldview. Yeah, absolutely correct.Also, I think another big misconception that I try to correct every time I talk about it
25:03is this idea that people in the Middle Ages like, oh, you were lucky to make it to age 25,and that was everyone died at age 30. Right. That was the life expectancy was 30. And that'sbecause people are taking means when there was a huge infant mortality. Use the median people.Yeah. So I think the statistic that I think is probably most accurate is as many as like 25%of children didn't reach their fifth birthday. But if you reached adulthood, you were probablygoing to live into your 60s or 70s. If you were noble, and even peasants who obviously didn'thave as much nutrition and whose lives were just generally harder, probably would liveinto their 50s or 60s. You know, you would have to do it with a lot of pain, but like, yeah,
25:49you would do it. The Middle Ages, the bullet points of this is just a big long period wheremore things than mud shoveling were happening. Right. If you're talking about a period ofa thousand years, then like a single name for it is by definition going to fail to describe itcompletely. But this is what we have to work with. So let's talk about the Iron Maiden.Yes. The first written record of an Iron Maiden comes from the end of the 1700s. And there's asort of historian travel writer named Johann Philip Siebensky, who writes about an executionhappening in 1515 in Nuremberg. Two things to flag. 1515 is not the Middle Ages. He says that a coinforger was tortured in what he describes as a, now we call an Iron Maiden, he didn't have that name
26:43for it. But Sarah, if you would, would you read this quote, what allegedly happened to this coinforger in 1515? Okay. Because he heard about it. He heard about it from his neighbor's friend's cousin.Well, it's been, it's been 200 years. He's a British guy, or he's showing up in Nurembergto write a travel brochure. I should start writing travel journalism and showing up and asking peopleabout torture devices that existed almost 300 years ago. That would be a fun way to see Indianapolis. He was, he was German, not, not British. I just messed up. But yeah, he's writing, he wantspeople to come to Nuremberg for the tourism and would please read what he says happened200 years ago for a coin forger. Okay. So he writes slowly so that the very sharp points
27:35penetrated his arms and his legs in several places and his belly and chest and his bladderand the root of his member and his eyes and his shoulder and his buttocks, but not enough to killhim. And so he remained making great cry and lament for two days after which he died. I'm soglad we learned that his butt was stabbed. The root of his member, the root of his member. I mean,you read that and you're like, whoa, wild. Yeah, that sounds bad. I don't want it.Again, the source of this, our first written record of what we now know as the Iron Maidencomes from this guy writing about a thing he heard that happened in Nuremberg. But there's nocontemporary or physical evidence of this. Right. So if this happened, it's very sad,
28:26but I'm not convinced. A lot of historians think that it's possible Johan Philip just made it upbecause it was interesting or he heard about it. Or he was quoting, there's an entry in the OxfordEnglish Dictionary from another guy, Johan Georg Keisler, traveling through Germany, Bohemia,Switzerland and Italy, in which he sort of also, I guess, has heard tell of this sort of thing.But I also haven't found that source translated. He's like original source. So it's hard for meto confirm what actually that other Johan was writing about. Do we need to get a German speakeron this? Yeah. Yeah. But basically, this is the written source of it. He goes to Nuremberg towrite his travel pamphlet. He hears something wild or makes it up. And from that point on,
29:13they fabricate Iron Maiden that whether the purpose of them is to pretend to be authentic,sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. There's a an art dealer named Matthew Peacock,who hears the story of Johan, and in the early 1800s fabricates his own working Iron Maidenand sells it to a museum. Good for him. I'm not sure whether he sold it claiming it was medieval.I imagine he did. I mean, you would get more money that way. I don't have the sales receipt.But I think he probably was like, ah, I found it. But we know that he just made it.But it's so funny that we're talking about essentially an idea going viral in the sameway it does now, where like something turns up, somebody hears something or makes something up,
30:05and then people get invested in it. They're like, that Iron Maiden thing, that's very compelling.It's memorable. So I think a lot of historians and probably medieval historians who have spenttheir lifetimes trying to refute that people were just throwing each other in Iron Maidens in themedieval period have just tried to trace like, okay, did Siebenzki just make it up? Possibly?Maybe he was confused because there was a thing called the coat of shame that was basicallypunishment for poachers and sex workers in the 13th century. Okay, I'm opening a link.So this looks like a barrel. Do you have to sit in a barrel?It's a barrel. Look at the lower one. The second link shows someone in it.
30:49Oh, that's not that bad. It's basically a barrel that your head sticks out of.Right. There's barrels everywhere. So yeah, it's a guy who's got a barrel covering his torso,so you can't move your arms. But it's like, it's not like, I was really imagining that it wasgoing to be somebody like hunched force to stay inside the barrel for like a while as punishment.Basically, the idea was humiliation. Yeah, I feel like we've been really big on that in a waythat these over the top stories hide a little bit. As far as we have evidence of torture,it's more akin to that sort of thing, like things that are bad and unpleasant and uncomfortable,like pillories, you know, where you like to hear head through a lot of it is like public shaming.
31:34Hmm. But it's also not, they're not saw movie killing devices. Like you can't be like,Buzzfeed, they would tie your arms to your legs and make you sit in the town square for a day.Like, yeah, and I feel like this connects again. Like I think if we're going around imagining thatpeople in the Middle Ages or whenever we're just kind of gleefully torturing each other all day,then that allows us to be like, well, we're very different. Like we definitely don't torture peoplebecause if you're going to have a brazen bull, like you need someone to run it. You need someoneto maintain it. You need people to clean it out. How often are you using it? How are you gettingthe bodies out the smell? Right? It's like it's you need people to work on that. And I think what
32:13we can recognize from modern society is that systems of torture operate most efficientlywhen people are being told that what they're doing is good. And I don't have to supply examples of that.So the story with the Iron Maiden is basically people hear that and the same reason, you know,elementary school kids today are compelled by it. People were like, whoa. And fake Iron Maidensare basically built out of sometimes just whole cloth, sometimes out of other antiques that theysort of clobber together. And they're created throughout the 19th century by showmen, con artists,people who want to sell them to museums, museums that display them for profit. People say they'rereal medieval torture devices, I think because people sort of had the
32:59uncritical understanding of when the medieval period was in the 1800s, as they do now.And an Iron Maiden that they said was real was on display at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893.Of course. But not a single Iron Maiden is dated any earlier than the 1800s.That's so funny.We have absolutely not a single record of any Iron Maiden or Iron Maiden deviceexisting earlier than the 1800s.And I like to think that H.H. Holmes went by and saw it and was like, seems too complicated.This but a hotel.
33:39I'm not going to wipe down 30 spikes every night. I'm just going to do trap doors.That brings us, I think, to the Chastity Belt.What is your understanding of a Chastity Belt?Well, Dana, I am a student of history and as the fits that I have seen, Robin Hood,Men and Tights many times.As you should.Yeah, Loxley and Begell, a match made in heaven.So what we learned from Robin Hood, Men and Tights is that Made Marion,
34:14who is Robin Hood's lady love, is wearing a Chastity Belt, which basically,I think it actually has an Everlast logo on it.She's a great 90s Mel Brooks joke.And it's just, it just looks like a metal pair of jockey shorts, basically.Like it's just metal underwear.It has a padlock.The key to my heart.And so the final beat of the movie is like, Robin has won.
34:44Everything's great.Justice has come to Sherwood Forest and then we're zooming out from the castle.And we hear Kerry always go, can anyone call a locksmith?And that's my entire understanding of Chastity Belt.So for a long time, there was an understanding that in the middle ages,to protect female Chastity, they wore Chastity Belts.The British Museum actually had one as a medieval art, quote unquote,artifact until 1996 when they had to remove it from the collection
35:15because they discovered it was actually made in the 19th century.Surprise, surprise.They can just open a gallery of scams.I would be very into that.I know that that would be a really fun exhibit.All right.So it's not like the full maid, Marion.It's you basically have a metal band that goes around your waist, I guess.
35:34And then you have a band in the front and a band in the back.And then there's a metal plate that goes over your area.There's like a little round poop hole.Yeah.That's important.It seems way too small.Like, I don't know what the scale is for this, but well,then actually there's an opening, like a fairly long, narrow opening,
35:54which it seems like I guess you couldn't have sex through.I guess that's intended for peeing.But you just find someone with a narrow dick and you're in business.I know this isn't real.But again, it was in their museum.So anyone who visited the British Museum, I mean, up until 1996 would have been like,ah, medieval Chastity devices.There you go.
36:11It's confirmed.There's a history professor named Albrecht Plassen who works out of Arizonaand wrote an entire book that is impenetrable, I will say politely, but that I read pieces of,called The Medieval Chastity Belt, A Mythmaking Process, talking about why people actually thinkthat medieval Chastity devices were real, because he argues that they never actually were real.And he says there's a bunch of literary representation, but almost no historicalreferences to any man ever actually trying to put a Chastity Belt on his wife.And he argues that all of these literary references are allegorical or satirical.
36:52Like there's one drawing of a Chastity Belt that shows up in this 1405 work about militaryengineering with a bunch of designs for catapults and armor and instruments of war.But he's like, in this book, there are also objects for making people invisible.And there are fart jokes.You know, the class argues that, like, no, the Chastity Belt is also a joke,because most of the time when they appear in writing and literature, it's almost like a,it's almost like a, are they called the Longhorns?Who are those, who's that couple in the cartoons?
37:29It's on the tip of my tongue, but is it one of those classic, just like a married couple whoare griping at each other the whole time?Yeah, it's not the Longhorns, but it's the Lockhorns.The Lockhorns, oh my god.So it's like the cartoon will be like a husband being like, goodbye, honey,I'm leaving, here's your Chastity Belt.And then like the panel will be like her lover, like hiding behind a column, holding a key.I think people underestimate that people, you know, a thousand years ago still had a sense of humor.
37:57No, senses of humor were invented in 1961 by Meera and Stiller.But right, like that's, it's a joke, like your husband is leaving.Right.Classen, the historian is pretty funny.He shows like a lot of fake medieval chastity devices where it's like, it shaped like a heart.If you think about it for a second, it doesn't work.Okay.And then do we only have examples that were made after the middle ages?
38:23Or do we have any kind of like, like a really old Chastity Belt that somebody could have wornas a joke or like to be sexy or something?All, it seems as if all of our actual Chastity Belts that we have are from the 1800s.If not outright hoaxes, then kind of as jokes.Right.Or as like maybe something that it's fun to wear for an evening, which seems possible.And then I would like to imagine historians 500 years from now being like,do you know that in the 20th century, people wore edible underwear every day?
38:56And it was, and then they would eat it at the end of the day.And that was what people wore.It also occurs to me that as someone who has gotten horrible repeated yeast infections merelyfrom wearing a damp bathing suit for too many hours, like imagining wearing metal underwearover a vagina in a time before antibiotics, I think people would be dropping dead,honestly, with the infections they'd get.Where would they have access to cranberries for cranberry juice?Where are the nearest bogs?
39:27I'm pretty sure they didn't have ocean spray.I mean, it's just, no.Yeah.Anything that would be wildly impractical today, like there is a good chance that it would bewildly impractical a thousand years ago, too.We haven't changed that much physically.Yeah.Again, I want to make it like very clear that like there was,
39:46there were bad things happening in the medieval time period.Like there were executions.And when people were tortured, it happened, but it was mostly just like boring.Like it was like pillories and ropes that were just meant to humiliate and people werebeheaded or burned at the stake or killed really gruesomely in battle.But again, like the Pee Wee Herman breakfast machine aspect of it is by and large a Victorianinvention.And it also feels like if we're talking about it that way, then torture can be a way
40:17to obscure the inhumanity of execution or just kind of mass death as a social way of being andhow if I'm living in the 19th century and I'm some snotty Victorian, I can't really look aroundand be like, well, we don't execute people all the time.We don't have people dying of potentially preventable illness if we use some of thescience that we use on the poor.And we're not better in all of these ways.And today, like we're not better in terms of, as Americans, we live in a country thatstill largely believes in execution as punishment.
40:52We send teenagers off to war.Like we're still surrounded by death in these ways.But if you can be like, yeah, but we don't torture people like that, then that feels kind of good.And yet isn't an electric chair kind of more gruesome and insane when you think about itin the abstract than an iron maiden?It's pretty fucking gruesome, especially because I don't think that anyone was imagining that theiron maiden was being run by the state or that there was this somberness to it and this ideathat we're going to have this chain of command where enough people decide to put you in the
41:33iron maiden, that it's not really anybody's fault.And we have to put you in this iron maiden to deter future, whatever it is that you did.And especially now that one of the issues we've had in the past few years in the U.S.is that companies don't want to manufacture the chemicals used in lethal injection.Oh, it's terrible.But that means that there's a supply chain crisis for them.So we've had quite a few botched lethal injection executions where people are effectively tortured.And it doesn't appear to have occurred to anyone that you could just not execute someone
42:07if you don't have the proper tools for it.No, you just have to come up with an as gruesome chemical strategy as possible.Yeah.Even injecting people with painful muscle spasmatic torturous chemicals is not as gross as the pairof anguish.So there you go.So we're doing fine.So tell me about this pair.
42:28Sarah, from your understanding slash that BuzzFeed listicle video,what do you imagine the pair of anguish to be?Okay.So what the video told me is that I guess it's shaped like a pair and then it is metal, I guess.And what I remember from the graphic is that it's in like four segments.So I assume you take this pair, you insert it.I wish that the people at home could see like how many gestures I'm making.This is my most gestural episode, but you insert it into the mouth, anus, or vagina,
43:01and then you open it.And then these segments, it reminds me of something from the Great Mouse Detective.It's like this thing that opens up and splits.Depending on the strength of the, you know, if this is metal that we're using for this,which I assume we are, which then we get into, how are we fabricating these things?Anyway, I think that I could only probably handle one go round and then I would die probably.So again, it seems more like execution than torture.Well, you said something very smart as you were describing it, which was like,
43:35if it's strong enough to go.And one historian named Chris Bishop was like, huh,because of course people looked at this object and thought, oh, I bet it was a torture devicethat you insert in someone's orifice and open.This historian discovered that even though by the 1860s, that's when the discussionabout the pair of anguish, ah, I'm an evil torture device was happening.He realized that if you actually try to put it in something with resistance,the springs are way too weak to open.
44:12And also the latch isn't meant to open against pressure.I don't understand like mechanics, but like it's not a screw that's meant to gradually open.It's like a key and it's not meant to operate against resistance just because the springisn't that strong.Bishop argues that the pair probably didn't even exist, but the main purpose of itwas probably as a glove or sock stretcher.Because it just doesn't work as a torture device.It just wasn't built that way.
44:50Now I'm thinking about like every object in my home being examined for it's likewhether you could stick it in someone's butt and then kill them with it.And some of them you probably could.The only ever evidence that we have that it was ever used like on a person is there's a storyabout a criminal in Paris in the 1700s who used something like that of that descriptionto gag victims so they couldn't call for help.But it's something similar like it widens in your mouth so you can't scream.Right. Like Kevin Klein did in a fish called Wanda with an actual pair.
45:28So there is some utility there.Yeah, look at that.So that's the one like historical record that we have of someone using an opening mechanismon a person, but not meant to torture.Are we 0 for 4 at this point?How many do we have left?Yeah, the scolds bridle I think we have, which actually probably did exist.But again, after the Middle Ages, the earliest mention of anything like that comes from the
45:56late 1560s, which is 100 years after the latest possible iteration of the Middle Ages.I think that sometimes people see like a scary metal mask and assume it was really torturous.It's still sort of in that like pillory humiliation realm.Like it wasn't meant to hurt you.It was just like to punish women allegedly who were perceived as gossipy.Which, you know, it is not great.But the BuzzFeed video told me that if you moved your tongue, it would be pierced by spikes.No spikes.
46:29It's just a bridle, like a horse bridle that was meant as a form of public humiliation.It's really interesting to me that the things we're talking about,they're either inventions from later on where people are using the idea of this is what theMiddle Ages people did, which makes it sound like it's what people are doing in their 40s.But this is what people did in the medieval times.So we're so much better.But we, through our superiority, we get to enjoy thinking about or manufacturing these faketorture objects.
47:06But we're allowed to do it in a way that is emphasizing our superiority to these imaginarypeople who didn't actually use these things.And that allows us to make these things.Or that there is some reality to it.But the mode of torture that we're talking about is public humiliation orbeing displayed as someone who needs to be publicly shamed.That I guess that public shaming is taking the place of where we imagine a lot of other stuffoccurring.
47:36And yeah.Yeah.Again, still bad and not good that these modes of societal discipline existed, in my opinion.But I don't think it satisfies that same itch that Madam Tussaud Knockoff Torture Museumsare trying to get people to buy into.To go back to being an 11-year-old at the Kings Cross Wax Museum,I feel like the feeling that you get, it's like you walk through this gallery,and they're playing scary sounds, of course.
48:05And you feel very grown up because there's a disclaimer saying that you should only,you know, that it's not for children.And you're like, I'm not a child, I'm a tween.And then, you know, and you go through it, you look at them all, and then you emerge.And it's a beautiful day.And you've made it, and you're proud, and you've seen something scary and lived to tell the tale.And the sort of sunny, beautiful world that you're stepping into is safe in comparison.And I think that that's how horror movies work.
48:34I think that's how scary stories work, generally.And I think that that's necessary and good for us, if that's what we need.And that's also a way of creating a false binary between this is the scary thing,and then this is the safe world outside of it.And really, you know, there's a lot of scary stuff.There's a lot of torture happening around us.Yeah.One of the other most popular, quote, unquote, medieval torture devices
49:01in medieval torture device museums is The Rack,which I'm familiar from because I feel like in a Muppets movie,Gonzo gets stretched out and then his arms and legs become long.Yeah, I think was that Muppet Treasure Island?I remember he really liked it.I think it's Muppet Treasure Island, and he did really like it.The Rack was, I mean, according to historians used,but also not during the Middle Ages, according to like the Tower of London,
49:29because they have their own, quote, unquote, torture museum,torture was only employed in the Tower during the 16th and 17th centuries,and only a fraction of the Tower's prisoners were tortured.So in documents, I think they only have one actual document of a confirmed caseof someone being used on the Rack, and the other ones are like hearsay and stories.Allegedly, the lieutenant had to have a warrant to support racking,but mostly the purpose was for prisoners to be shown it and be threatened with it.And the purpose was, I mean, torture to get people to confess,
50:04which we still do today.I don't know how long waterboarding has been around,but it was certainly popularized in the last 20 years.So it's certainly an era of innovation.And right, and then we're talking about the concept of torture.Like I feel like when we imagine medieval torture and the Iron Maidens,like I think of it as like, I don't think I've ever heard about it in the contextof like, this is what they would do to you to get information out of you,
50:31if that's what they needed, that it's not a utilitarian thing.It's just that people in the Middle Ages loved torturing.Yeah, and there was probably like, I'm imagining like,like a Christian gray torture dungeon of all these different like macabre devices side by side.Like, ah, if the pair of anguish doesn't work on you, we'll try the rack.I'm never going to say that like people aren't out here doing terrible things to each otherevery single day.Like I'm not denying that that's always been true.
50:59But I think I just think that people who hurt each otheroverwhelmingly, the person doing the harm isn't like, I'm a big torture guy.And that's what I'm into, torture, torture, torture.The main reason that stories about medieval torture get perpetuatedare because people do have this macabre morbid fascination and curiosity.Like I think the same impulse that draws people to horror movies and true crimesis what draws people to the idea of like medieval torture devices.The San Diego Museum of Man had a history of torture exhibit,
51:39and they said that attendance at their museum rose up 60% compared to the previous year,which like pulled them out of a financial hole.Good for them.Most of the myths about medieval torture came about during the 17, 1800s,the, you know, pre and then later Victorian era,when I think the Enlightenment was happening and people were feeling very proud of themselves.Right.And I feel like your recent book connects with these themes, perhaps.
52:08Yes.Thank you.Yes.I wrote a book that I naturally will plug in conversation called Anatomy a Love Story,which takes place in the early 1800s in Edinburgh,which was when like the dawn of surgery was happening.Yeah.And just, I mean, looking at historical medicine, right?
52:24I feel like so much of what was done that was cutting edge at the time,no pun intended, was horrible to experience physically and kind of a torturous experience.But often that was just medicine and that was the best that anyone could do for you.And that's scary, much scarier to think about than the rack.I want to leave you with one final medieval torture device before we get into the meta.Something called the Spanish tickler.Okay.This is just a quick Google search for Spanish tickler.
52:55Just, you know, look at the Google results.Let me know what you see.It sounds like something I would purchase at an adult store.But here's what.Yeah.Google says, oh, oh, it looks like it.Okay.I'm getting, maybe, no, this is a different thing,
53:10but I'm getting a preview graphic.No, this is a Spanish tickler.I'm getting a preview graphic of those things we used to make pulled pork.Yeah, that's exactly it.So like shred it.Yeah.Okay.So it's like, it's like a Wolverine hand, basically.
53:23Yeah.So if you look over, if you tap over to like Google images,you can see that there's like some artistic renderings.It's like Wolverine hands on the end of sticks.So it's like those T-Rex hands and they're using it to claw at guys to tear their flesh off.Oh, yeah.Wow.The thing is, the Spanish tickler literally never existed.
53:47It was made up in 2005 as a hoax article on Wikipedia.That's fantastic.I mean, it sucks, but it's great.It's just fully made up.And yet it is in a ton of these listicles about like the worst punishment in the history of mankindand most brutal torture devices.I mean, I guess like it goes to show that if you're out there and if you want to trick peopleinto thinking that something existed that really didn't,
54:12it would probably be pretty easy to just invent a new medieval torture device.Because this is one of those, I mean, we talk on the show about likethings people don't need evidence to believe.And this is one of them.We're just like, we're ready to believe totally made up stuff.If I were in this fictive medieval torture supply company, you know,and if I were like trying to come up with a new idea, I'd be like, oh, it's spikes on a stick.And it's the Spanish tickler.
54:38And I imagine my boss would be like, this is embarrassing.You're an embarrassment.You can't just put spikes on a stick and call it an invention.I mean, that's kind of why it's so funny is because it does seem like a joke.It's like those like, again, scratchy hands on like an extendable pole.Yeah.Like I guess just tear it at someone's back.Like it's not even creative.
54:58It's just kind of funny.Or you could make pulled pork from far away.Yeah.You can make pulled pork carnitas for that distance.Whenever anyone listening to this, here's medieval torture device.I want in their brain to think, is this actually medieval?Most of the time it's not like a good, I would say three out of four,maybe of the things we talked about either didn't exist or people don't even report that they
55:25happened in the medieval times.I feel like the fact that it sounds like it has the word evil in it has probably not doneit any favors given how simplistic we are as thinkers.I really bet you're, I bet you're right, unfortunately.Again, I don't want to pretend that people in the medieval age were less brutal than usbecause they were horrifically brutal, like read an account of Christopher Columbus throughanything, which again is the end of the medieval period.But like people are awful, but people today are also awful.
55:59And like we torture people and we execute people.And I just think we have this natural impulse to ascribesaw like creativity to people in the olden times that just didn't exist.And then we get to be like, well, everyone here who isn't literally jigsaw is probably not thatscary.And the worst things in the world can't come from a bunch of people who are all workingtogether and being kind of lazy about it.The more evil pun intended, you make medieval torture devices, the less you have to reckon
56:31with the fact that even people doing the executions or the boring torture that did existstill thought they were the good guys.They didn't have to do the, are we the baddies?You know, Michelin web sketch, like, you know, if you were stringing someone up in the town squareon a, you know, in a pillory and or, you know, crushing their thumbs in a boring way or burningthem at the stake, like those people thought they were the good guys, the heroes, the sameway that I think people today make excuses for, you know, capital punishment or whateverhorrific things that happen in, you know, black ops units around the world in the name of America.
57:11But if it's happening in a torture chamber with spikes with a skull on the top, you're like,well, if I'm not doing that, I'm in the clear.Yeah. And that's, I think, is the danger of lazy history is that it turnspeople into the past into cartoons, and it allows us to inevitably be better than thembecause we're not letting them be real people.I think the takeaway is also it's very easy for hoaxes to work, like you can both get to theChicago World's Fair in 1893 with your fake Iron Maiden, the same way you can get your fakeSpanish tickler on listicles all over the internet. You just have to be brave enough to
57:50invent something. I'm going to invent one. It's a spike that goes in your mouth,and it just kills you. You just, you just push it all the way down.Oh, I like that. I think you could call it a knife.So I feel like it's like the Holy Roman Empire joke was that Voltaire or is this just one ofthose things that everyone says Voltaire said because he's the Marilyn Monroe of the 18thSanctuary whenever he was around that, you know, the Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy nor Romannor an empire. So if you see a medieval torture device, ask yourself, is it medieval? Is it fortorture? And finally, it's a device. And that was our episode. Thank you so much to Dana Schwartz.
58:39We always have the best time with Dana and I can't wait until she comes back again.And over on Patreon, we have an episode coming out this month featuring our repeat offenderguest Chelsea Webbersmith talking about the movie, the myth, the legend, the Blair Witch Project.So hop on over there if you want to listen to that. And you can also spend your money onliterally anything else. I recommend a soft serve ice cream. You can't go wrong.Thank you as always to our amazing producer, Carolyn Kendrick. See you next time.
There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click any sentence in the transcript to leave one.