Medieval Torture with Dana Schwartz

We want to play a game. This week, Dana Schwartz stuffs us in an iron maiden and explains why the most famous Medieval torture devices are none of the above. Digressions include the Kings Cross Wax Museum, getting stabbed in the butt, and the pivot to video era.

Links to stuff discussed within:

5 Of The Most Gruesome Medieval Torture Devices [Buzzfeed]
Sutton hoo artifact [1]
Sutton hoo artifact [2]
Coat of shame [1]
Coat of shame [2]

Here's where to find Dana:

Noble Blood [podcast] and Anatomy, A Love Story [novel]

Support us:

Bonus Episodes on Patreon

Donate on Paypal

Buy cute merch

Where else to find us:

Sarah's other show, You Are Good 

[YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase

Links:

http://noblebloodtales.com
http://www.danaschwartzdotcom.com/books.html
http://patreon.com/yourewrongabout
https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpod
https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good
http://maintenancephase.com
—
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2Se3knPozM&ab_channel=BuzzFeedVideo
https://www.britishmuseum.org/sites/default/files/styles/uncropped_medium/public/2019-10/gold-belt-buckle-sutton-hoo-british-museum-1000-500.jpg?itok=Tz1nO2MR
https://www.britishmuseum.org/sites/default/files/styles/uncropped_medium/public/2019-10/Purse%20lid%20from%20the%20ship-burial%20at%20Sutton%20Hoo%2C%20British%20Musem.jpg?itok=Ggs9B9_Y
https://www.ancient-origins.net/sites/default/files/Coat-of-Shame.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/82/Spansk_kappe_%282%29.jpg/440px-Spansk_kappe_%282%29.jpg

Transcript

Sarah: I should start writing, travel journalism and showing up and asking people about torture 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 medieval torture. We are joined today by our wonderful guest Dana Schwartz, who has been with us many times. We've talked to her about Catherine the Great, we've learned from her about Maria Antoinette, about Anastasia. And one of the themes in our episodes with her is that our popular conception of 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 toward 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 somehow not recognizably human, the way that we are. And one of the themes whenever Dana comes on the show, is 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 recognize ourselves. And I like that. I like that about when Dana comes to talk to us. So I hope this episode is 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.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes we go to the Middle Ages. And with us today is Dana Schwartz. Hello.

Dana: Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited. I mean, you can tell that I'm obviously already chomping at the bit, so to say.

Sarah: Yes. You and I both I think around history have the energy of just a really excitable 12-year-old on a class trip, and simultaneously a public intellectual is the goal here. But just that pure enjoyment of talking about this period just makes me so happy. 

Dana: I'm going to do a throw forward and say I'm actually jumping at the scold's bridle. 

Sarah: Ah! And Dana, you do a little bit of history talking. Tell us about your podcast.

Dana: Yeah, I have a podcast called Noble Blood. We're 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 people get wrong when they talk about the past. But yeah, listen to Noble Blood wherever you get your podcasts. If you want true stories of historical royals, follow me on the internet, Dana Schwartzzz with three Z's. And pick up a book I wrote called, Anatomy: A Love Story. And that's all the plugs. 

Sarah: So there's more to listen to when you're done with this episode.

Dana: Yeah. Oh, I get so excited about historical misconceptions. I get to feel like Sherlock Holmes, but without any of the physical danger. 

Sarah: So we are talking today about medieval torture, which I feel doesn't really explain the giddiness in my voice. But I'm going to give a little bit of a preamble and set up why I brought you in, and then you're going to take us on this ride. 

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 thought was Madame Tussaud’s, but it actually was the King's Cross Wax Museum. 

Dana: An off-brand Madame Tussaud’s. 

Sarah: Right. And I know that Madame Tussaud’s also has a rich history of morbid waxwork, but I haven't seen them yet. So the Kings Cross Wax Museum had an exhibit of medieval torture devices. And obviously as a middle schooler, I was extremely fascinated by this. And honestly, I think it's what I most remember of all of Sydney, one of our world's great cities. So that's worrying. 

And then I read a couple years ago in passing that our ideas about medieval torture, or specifically I was reading about the iron maiden, and just this kind of snippet about the iron maiden was - from my understanding, and you're going to tell us the real version - but my understanding of it is that the iron maiden was invented as a concept by Victorians so they could be like, people in the Middle Ages were really silly, but not us, we’re very intelligent and rational, we Victorians. So that feels like it might undermine the entire concept of the Middle Ages as a time when everyone was just torturing each other. 

Dana: The idea of the dark ages itself was invented so that people after it could be like, we're enlightened, they were the Dark Ages. And then I feel like torture devices are sort of been a perfect synecdoche of that. I'm not using that word correctly, but an example of that in the sense that they're a perfect microcosm of that bigger idea. Where it's 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 are remembering about your trip to Sydney, that it was fun and memorable and enthralling, is the reason that the idea of medieval torture devices exists today in the first place. They truly are an invention for museums. 

Sarah: And wax museums.  

Dana: And wax museums. To start off, I'm going to send you a video. It's a Buzzfeed video. They're not particularly well vetted, necessarily. I think the quality of Buzzfeed fact checking, as we know compared to Buzzfeed News with 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 probably underpaid and who's work they're not getting the rights to, churned this out without doing a ton of insight or research. 

Sarah: It's almost how like an opinion section of a paper is completely separate from news, because I've in the past written for Buzzfeed and been fact checked to hell and back. And then you have these other things that are just listicles, where as a layperson, you can identify a couple of errors all at once. 

Dana: Absolutely. And this is the worst example of it. Where the purpose of this video is to be inflammatory, to be heavily shared. Almost everything about it is incorrect. There is, I would argue, maybe not a sentence that is correct. 

Sarah: Alright, let's do it. 3, 2, 1, go, play. It's Gold's bridal, punishment for gossip, nagging, cursing, unwanted talking. Okay. Spiked plate projected into the mouth.

Dana: And look at this, the video itself. I think if you could describe, it's like trying to get your attention like black and white flashing.

Sarah: We have the rack, which I remember from the King's Cross Wax Museum and a lot of Monty Python sketches, about how nobody expects a Spanish inquisition. Yeah. And we're playing what I would describe as rights free metal. 

Dana: Rights free metal. 

Sarah: Oh, the iron maiden. So gruesome. It was thought it must be fictional, but it's real. Pair of anguish. Ooh. Okay. Okay. This one was in Saw, this was in Saw 7, the Brazen Bull. 

Dana: This was in Saw 7? I've only seen a few of the Saws. 

Sarah: Saw 7 is bizarrely the only one of the Saw movies that I feel like is gross in its attitudes toward women. The other movies are fully about torturing straight, white men. And I think that's really revolutionary for a film series. 

Dana: Okay. So what's your impression of that video? 

Sarah: Oh my God. Orally, I cannot do justice. But basically, it's again, it is the kind of thing I would've loved when I was 11. I feel like we're also going to be unpacking through this whole conversation, what it means to be attracted to morbid or violent or creepy stuff, in the way that middle schoolers are, in a way that I think I 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 them not being fully developed empathetically. And I think that's true. And I also think that tweendom is like an incredibly anxious time when you don't have control over your life. And I have 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 more horrible than the last. And they've cued the music and the text.

Dana: This video's from 2013. And to me it's very, “Pivot to video on Facebook”. It's easily shareable. Basically, if you Google ‘medieval torture devices’, the internet is just full of listicles like this in every way, shape ,and form, with not a lot of critical thought applied to each one and they all sort of just recycle the same information.

Sarah: Yeah. It's the same drive that makes us read morbid Wikipedia articles. Or one of my perennial favorite Wikipedia pages, which is inventors killed by their own inventions.

Dana: And some people say the Brazen Bull was one of them. 

Sarah: I mean, if it was in Saw, how could it not be historically accurate? I don't know, Dana. 

Dana: Absolutely. Well, are you ready to dive into some quote unquote “medieval torture devices”?

Sarah: Yes.

Dana: I think the first thing that I want to make clear is the idea of the Brazen Bull maybe actually existed. But it wasn't medieval. That's the main thing I think I want to say. A lot of times things just get couched into medieval torture devices without an understanding of when the medieval period was.

Sarah: Maybe we could start with that. When was the medieval period and what in fact was it? 

Dana: Yeah, so the medieval period is a long period that historians sometimes divide into the early high Middle Ages and then late Middle Ages. It's from about 476 AD, which was the fall of Rome. And then most historians, I mean again, historians just love to disagree about when ages start and finish, but usually it sort of ends with the age of discovery. So the 1492 era or a little earlier. Think of it from the mid 400s to the mid 1400s, like a good thousand years. And in between that thousand years, we have what's considered the early Middle Ages, which is like Byzantine, Charlemagne, if that helps orient you. 

The high Middle Ages, which is like the year 1000, which is Chaucer, and The Crusades, and these little nation states around Europe, and also the Eastern Orthodox Church breaking from the Catholic Church. And then the late Middle Ages, which is like 1100 to 1450, the black death and the Papal schism. So when we're talking about the medieval period, it's a big stretch of time, but about that.

Sarah: It’s like trying to talk about 2020. Do we mean March of 2020 or December? They're extremely different. 

Dana: Totally different. But for context, the Brazen Bull is written about in the year 200 AD. A Christian apologist writes about it in a letter to the martyrs and like a theologian Augustine of Hippo, who again is from like 400 AD. There are two sources describing how a Roman general named Marcus Atilius Regales was tortured by the Carthaginians in 250 BC. 

Sarah: Were they in the room? 

Dana: They weren’t, but they're hearing these stories. So people in 200 AD, 450 years earlier, heard about a guy being tortured 250 years before the birth of Christ.

Sarah: I mean, when I'm gossiping with you about something that happened in the year 1522, I'm usually pretty accurate in my facts. 

Dana: Yeah. So again, maybe the Brazen Bull was real. Maybe it was 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 medieval period. 

Sarah: Right. But it's olden times.

Dana: Hundreds of years.

Sarah: When we're talking about the brazen bull, to me, the point is not like this never happened, this never was used. It's that if we're telling a story about history where like in the Middle Ages, people were just constantly placing each other in weber grills basically, and then burning each other to death. And it was just a thing people did and they loved it. It's okay, somebody doing something like this one time or someone in the history of humanity doing this torture method, maybe, that still doesn't create a world where people in the Middle Ages were just 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, no, our lives are really hard. We should focus on that. 

Dana: 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.

Sarah: Famously! It happened to Jesus. 

Dana: They famously crucified people. I remember being like a little Jewish kid and hearing about what crucifixion was, and thinking that was the worst thing physically possible. But again, the stories of the Brazen Bull, which is if you're unfamiliar, I guess it's like 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 when it heats up, it makes a noise, like a bellowing. I think we're uniquely drawn to people doing innovation in torturing because people burned people at the stakes. I mean, through the 1600s, much more recently, people were actually burning people. But this, because it's a device, I think that's why it gets put in listicles. 

Sarah: Because you're not going to read a listicle that's 10 historical people who got burned to death. What are we drawn to about that? That's really interesting. And if you're reading the history, we used to burn people. Oh, that's really depressing. And like, all there is to think about really is what it would be like to be burned.

Dana: Yeah. There's no whimsy to it. There's no Saw whimsy to it. 

Sarah: Yeah. I know. The thing about Saw is that I'm so happy, of course, Saw is relevant here, but yeah, I could talk so much about Saw. And I have on You are Good. But you know, the movies 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 number six and you're like, we're just supposed to be rooting for the trap at this point. We're being shown a bunch of people who are told they have to cut off a pound of their own flesh and no one thinks to put their clothes on the scale, that's positioning us on the side of the torture machine in a very interesting way.

Dana: I think throughout the course of this episode I hope we'll knock off all five of those Buzzfeed listicles. The first one is the Brazen Bull, if it ever existed, was torture, although more execution. 

Sarah: Yeah, that's a distinction.

Dana: Was not medieval by any stretch of the definition at all. It was squarely within the ancient world 250 years before the birth of Christ. The idea of the Middle Ages themselves is obviously something that only exists in retrospect. No one knows that they're living in any age as they're living in it. But basically the idea of the medieval period being characterized as sort of what we think of today as ignorance and superstition, came about during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment because they were excited about the Renaissance and enlightenment and needed that to exist in contrast to something which was what they characterized as a period where people put their entire life and faith in the church, the Catholic church and as such, there was no literacy and there was no independent thought and there was no art or math, it was just a wasteland. It was just a thousand years of, I guess, farmers digging holes for no reason in mud pits and people torturing each other. 

Sarah: You've seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail. They’re flinging mud around.

Dana: That’s exactly what I think what people just picture for a thousand years.

Sarah: Bring out your dead. And also, it's very funny to think about these Renaissance age of exploration types, sailing around, committing genocide, being like those idiotic 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, white people. 

Dana: Well, some other rich, white people, but not a lot of them. Just, if they're the wrong religion. I also think medieval historians are by and large just the best subgroup of people on the internet. They spend their entire days, it seems, just sighing, being like no, things happened. Things happened that we study. There's a big misconception, first off, because there was sort of by and large a culture of illiteracy across Western Europe. With most of the literacy concentrated in church institutions like monasteries, which a lot of medieval monks were doing a lot of important writing and creating a lot of important art. 

But I do think that paradigm associates illiteracy with being stupid in a way that doesn't track. Where a lot of information was just transmitted orally and recited through memory. There was a transition of oral storytelling and minstrels performing epic poetry over the span of days. And I think being like, “Oh, those stupid idiots didn't know how to write it down”, is not the best way to look at history. 

Sarah: I feel like a middle-aged person would probably look at me and be like, so you can't remember anything you've thought or done today, unless you go like this and then you put it in a log that the entire world can see, and then you can remember all your jokes. That's embarrassing. 

Dana: I go back through my own tweets to be like, yeah, I did watch that movie. 

Sarah: I would connect that even to a much more recent tradition of the protest song where, why was Pete Seger a songwriter? I mean, I'm sure partly 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 songs and people can learn songs and sing songs together. The idea of the written word is the only other superior method for transmitting information is very dangerous. 

Dana: And just dangerous to think that people were dumber inherently because they didn't know how to read. No, they had different methods of communication and history and storytelling that doesn't necessarily mean that they were all just like ignorant mud folk. So 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 next because horses work better than oxen they realize in certain tasks. But even if you are thinking like no, the only type of sophistication I value is like beautiful art for its own sake. There was a discovery right before World War I. I'm trying to open the chat so I can show you, there it is. 

Sarah: Okay. I'm opening. Oh, we're going. Ooh. Oh. 

Dana: Yeah. So we're looking at engraved belt buckles and also an engraved, the thing that would be at the top of a coin purse, basically a satchel that you would use a clasp.

Sarah: The only word for this is extra. 

Dana: They're gorgeous. There was a really important discovery, sort of at the turn of World War II, called Sutton Hoo, which is an Elia in England, which was a big burial mount. And this is from the early Middle Ages, like 400 something. 

Sarah: It's amazing. 

Dana: The purse lid that you're looking at was from Constantinople. There was international trade, and the belt buckle was like, it's beautiful craftsmanship.

Sarah:  It looks like gold. And it's like a claddagh ring, but like a Mecca claddagh ring. It's this huge, complicated, knot rendered in precious metal. It's incredible. I've never seen anything like it.  

Dana: And again, this was discovered within the last a hundred years, and I think it's enlightening about what life was like for the Anglo-Saxon tribes before England became England, back in 400 AD in a way that I think if people saw it, would fundamentally disrupt how they pictured those tribes. 

Sarah: You really don't picture people having a lot of glam in 400 AD, is the thing. I also remember, my mom is a big Simon Schama stan, so we watched a History of Britain. And there's a section about, I'm going to get all of this wrong, but a place where people lived at, probably around the year zero. Between then and this belt buckle around that very long era, and just the reconstruction of this is what the bedding would've been like. And you would've had like animal skins, because this is what the house was like, a pretty nice house. And just the fact that I think something very dangerous happens when we don't think of people throughout history as having different abilities to get it. But the same basic needs and desire for a place that's not only comfortable, but cute. We've always wanted to be cute. I think that's very important.

Dana: So I also think the patriarch, like the big historical source of so many things in the 1330s is, the first one, I think who most historians describe to him calling the Medieval Period, the Dark Ages. But I also think it's important to recognize 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 Khwar. I want to pronounce this right. Muhammad Al-Khwarizmi, and he was born in 780. Just like 780. In the 12th century, his work was translated into Latin and that's what gives us the word ‘algorithm’.

Sarah: So he invented YouTube. 

Dana: Yeah. He invented YouTube and TikTok. 

Sarah: Somebody had to. Yeah. Wow. 

Dana: So there were a lot of exciting mathematical things happening throughout the world. 

Sarah: I mean, and also, it's yeah. It's important to point out that when we're talking about the Middle Ages, I think that both refer primarily to Western Europe, if not entirely. And it does a disservice to everyone, right? Because if we're like the Middle Ages, the peasants caked in mud and eating whatever, more mud, I don't know, mud was mud seasoning. It's like not only does that discredit the Western Europeans who you're actually bothering to think about, but then everyone else just doesn't exist in the entire world during that period in that worldview. 

Dana: Absolutely correct. Also, I think another big misconception that I try to correct every time I talk about it is this idea that people in the Middle Ages like, oh, you were lucky to make it to age 25. Everyone died at age 30, right? That was the life expectancy was 30. And that's because people are taking means when there was a huge infant mortality.

Sarah: Use the median people.

Dana: Yeah. So I think the statistic that I think is probably most accurate is that as many as 25% of children didn't reach their fifth birthday. But if you reached adulthood, you were probably going to live into your sixties or seventies. If you were noble and even peasants, who obviously didn't have as much nutrition and whose lives were just generally harder, probably would live into their fifties or sixties. 

Sarah: You would have to do it with a lot of pain, but yeah, you would do it. 

Dana: The Middle Ages, the bullet points of this is just a big, long period where more things than mud shoveling were happening.

Sarah: If you're talking about a period of a thousand years then like a single name for is by definition going to fail to describe it completely, but this is what we have to work with. 

Dana: So let's talk about the iron maiden. The first written record of an iron maiden comes from the end of the 1700s. And there's a sort of historian travel writer named Johann Philipp Siebenkees, who writes about an execution happening in 1515 in Nuremberg. Two things to flag. 1515 is not the Middle Ages. He says that a coin forger was tortured in what he describes as now what we call an iron maiden. He didn't have that name for it. But Sarah, if you would you read this quote, what allegedly happened to this coin forger in 1515? 

Sarah: Okay. Because he heard about it. He heard about it from his neighbor's friend's cousin. 

Dana: Well, it's been 200 years. He's a British guy or he's showing up in Nuremberg to write a travel brochure. 

Sarah: I should start writing travel journalism and showing up and asking people about torture devices that existed almost 300 years ago. That would be a fun way to see Indianapolis. 

Dana: He was German not British. I messed up. But yeah, he's writing. He wants people to come to Nurnberg for the tourism. And please read what he says happened 200 years ago for a coin forger. 

Sarah: Okay. So he writes, “Slowly, so that the very sharp points penetrated his arms and his legs in several places, and his belly, and chest, and his bladder, and the root of his member, and his eyes, and his shoulder, and his buttocks, but not enough to kill him. And so he remained making great cry and lament for two days, after which he died.” I'm so glad we learned that his butt was stabbed.

Dana: The root of his member.

Sarah: The root of his member. 

Dana: I mean, you read that and you're like, whoa, wild. 

Sarah: Yeah, that sounds bad. I don't want it. 

Dana: The source of this, our first written record of what we now know is the iron maiden, comes from this guy writing about a thing he heard that happened in Nuremberg. But there's no contemporary or physical evidence of this. Right? 

Sarah: So if this happened, it's very sad. But I'm not convinced. 

Dana: A lot of historians think that it's possible Johann Philipp just made it up, because it was interesting, or he heard about it. Or he was quoting. There's an entry in the Oxford English dictionary from another guy, Johann Georg Kessler, 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, his like original source, so it's hard for me to confirm what actually that the other Johann was writing about. 

Sarah: Do we need to get a German speaker on this? 

Dana: Yeah, but basically this is the written source of it. He goes to Nurnberg to write his travel pamphlet. He hears something wild or makes it up. And from that point on they fabricate iron maidens that, whether the purpose of them is to pretend to be authentic, sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. There's an art dealer named Matthew Peacock, who hears the story of Johan, and in the early 1800s fabricates his own working iron maiden and sells it to a museum.

Sarah: Good for him.

Dana: I'm not sure whether he sold it claiming it was medieval. I imagine he did. 

Sarah: I mean, you would get more money that way.  

Dana: 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.

Sarah: But it's so funny that we're talking about essentially an idea going viral in the same way it does now where something turns up, somebody hears something or makes something up and then people get invested in it. They're like, that iron maiden thing, that's very compelling. 

Dana: It’s memorable. So I think a lot of historians and probably medieval historians who have spent their lifetimes trying to refute that people were just throwing each other in iron maidens and the medieval period have just tried to trace, okay, did Siebenkees just make it up? Possibly. Maybe he was confused because there was a thing called the ‘coat of shame’ that was basically punishment for poachers and sex workers in the 13th century. 

Sarah: Okay. I'm opening a link. So this looks like a barrel. Do you have to sit in a barrel? 

Dana: It's a barrel, look at the lower one. The second length shows someone in it. 

Sarah: Oh, that's not that bad. 

Dana: It's basically a barrel that your head sticks out of. 

Sarah: 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 not, I was really imagining that it was going to be somebody hunched, forced to stay inside the barrel for like a while as punishment.

Dana: Basically the idea was humiliation. 

Sarah: Yeah. I feel like we've been really big on that in a way that these over-the-top stories hide a little bit. 

Dana: As far as we have evidence of torture, it's more akin to that sort of thing. Things that are bad and unpleasant and uncomfortable, like pillars, where you stick your head through. A lot of it is like public shaming. But it's also not, they're not Saw movie killing devices. 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. 

Sarah: Yeah. And I feel like this connects again, I think if we're going around imagining that people in the Middle Ages or whenever we're just gleefully torturing each other all day, then that allows us to be like, well, we're very different. We definitely don't torture people because if you're going to have a brazen bull, like you need someone to run it. You need someone to maintain it. You need people to clean it out. 

Dana: How often are you using it? How are you getting the bodies out? The smell… 

Sarah: Right? You need people to work on that. And I think what we can recognize from modern society is that systems of torture operate most efficiently when people are being told that what they're doing is good and I don't have to supply examples of that. 

Dana: So the story with the iron maiden is basically people hear that and the same reason elementary school kids today are compelled by it, people were like, whoa! And fake iron maidens are basically built out of sometimes just whole cloth, sometimes out of other antiques that they sort 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're real medieval torture devices I think, because people sort of had the new critical 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, but not a single iron maiden is dated any earlier than the 1800s.

Sarah: That’s so funny. 

Dana: We have absolutely not a single record of any iron maiden or iron Maiden device existing earlier than the 1800s. 

Sarah: And I like to think that HH Holmes went by and saw it and was like, seems too complicated. 

Dana: This, but a hotel. 

Sarah: I'm not going to wipe down 30 spikes every night. I'm just going to do trap doors.

Dana: So that brings us, I think, to the chastity belt.

Sarah: Yes.

Dana: What is your understanding of a chastity belt?

Sarah: Well, Dana, I am a student of history, and as befits that, I have seen Robin Hood, Men in Tights many times. 

Dana: Yes, as you should. Yeah. 

Sarah: Loxley and Miguel, a match made in heaven. And so what we learned from Robin Hood: Men and Tights, is that Maid Marion, who is Robin Hood's lady love, is wearing a chastity belt. Which basically, I think it actually has an Everlast logo on it, which is a great 90’s Mel Brooks joke. And it just looks like a metal pair of jockey shorts, basically. It's just metal underwear. It has a padlock, the key to my heart. And so the final beat of the movie is Robin has won, everything's great. Justice has come to Sherwood Forest. And then we're zooming out from the castle, and we hear Cary Elwes go, “Can anyone call a locksmith?” And that's my entire understanding of Chastity belts. 

Dana: 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 quote unquote “artifact” until 1996, when they had to remove it from the collection. Because they discovered it was actually made in the 19th century. Surprise, surprise. 

Sarah: They can just open a gallery of scams. I would be very into that. 

Dana: I know that would be a really fun exhibit. 

Sarah: All right. So it's not like the full Maid Marion. You basically have a metal band that goes around your waist, I guess. And 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.

Dana: There's a little round poop hole. I feel like that's important for people to know.  

Sarah: It seems way too small. I don't know what the scale is for this, but well, and then actually there's an opening, like a fairly long narrow opening, which it seems 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.

Dana: But again, it was in their museum. So anyone who visited the British museum, I mean, up until 1996, would've been like, ah, medieval Chastity devices. 

Sarah: There you go. It's confirmed. 

Dana: There's a history professor named Albrecht Classen, who works out of Arizona and wrote an entire book that is impenetrable, I will say politely, but that I read pieces of called, the Medieval Chastity Belt, a Myth Making Process, talking about why people actually think that 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 historical references 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. 

There's one drawing of a chastity belt that shows up in this 1405 work about military engineering 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. Classen argues that no, the chastity belt is also a joke because most of the time when they appear in writing and literature it's almost like, are they called the Longhorns? Who's that couple in the cartoons? 

Sarah: It's on the tip of my tongue, but is it one of those classic, just a married couple who are griping at each other the whole time? 

Dana: Yeah. It's not the Longhorns, but it's the Lockhorns. 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 the panel will be her lover hiding behind a column, holding a key. I think people underestimate that people a thousand years ago still had a sense of humor.

Sarah: Yeah. Senses of humor were invented in 1961 by Meara and Stiller. 

Dana: It's a joke, your husband is leaving. Classen as a historian is pretty funny. He shows a lot of fake medieval chastity devices where it's shaped like a heart. If you think about it for a second, it doesn't work.

Sarah: Okay. And then, do we only have examples that were made after the Middle Ages? Or do we have any kind of a really old chastity belt that somebody could have worn as a joke or to be sexy or something? 

Dana: It seems as if all of our actual chastity belts that we have are from the 1800. If not outright hoaxes, then as jokes, right. 

Sarah: Or as 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 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, merely from wearing a damp bathing suit for too many hours, imagining wearing metal underwear over a vagina in a time before antibiotics. I think people would be dropping dead, honestly, with the infections they'd get.

Dana: Where would they have access to cranberries, cranberry juice? Where are the nearest bogs? 

Sarah: I'm pretty sure they didn't have Ocean Spray. I mean, it's just, no, yeah. Anything that would be wildly impractical today, there is a good chance that it would be wildly impractical a thousand years ago too. We haven't changed that much physically.

Dana: Yeah. Again, I want to make it very clear that there were bad things happening in the medieval time period. There were executions. And when people were tortured, it happened, but it was mostly just boring. It was like pillories and ropes that were just meant to humiliate and people were beheaded or burnt at the stake or killed really gruesomely in battle. But again, the Pee Wee Herman breakfast machine aspect of it is by and large a Victorian invention. 

Sarah: And it also feels if we're talking about it that way, then torture can be a way to obscure the inhumanity of execution or just mass death as a social way of being and how if I'm living in the 19th century and I'm some snotty Victorian, I can't really look around and 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 the science that we use on the poor and we're not better in all of these ways. And today, we're not better in terms of, we as Americans, we live in a country that still largely believes in execution as punishment. We send teenagers off to war. 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 good. 

Dana: And yet isn't an electric chair more gruesome and insane when you think about it in the abstract than an iron maiden? 

Sarah: It's pretty fucking gruesome, especially because I don't think that anyone was imagining that the iron maiden was being run by the state or that there was this somberness to it. And this idea that we're going to have this chain of command where enough people decide to put you in the iron 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. I mean, and especially now that one of the issues we've had in the past few years in the US is that companies don't want to manufacture the chemicals used in lethal injection.

Dana: Oh, it's terrible. 

Sarah: But that means that there's a supply chain crisis for them. So we've had quite a few boxed 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 if you don't have the proper tools for it.

Dana: No, you just have to come up with an as gruesome chemical strategy as possible. Even injecting people with painful muscle spasmatic torturous chemicals is not as gross as the pair of anguish.  

Sarah: So there you go. So we're doing fine. So tell me about this pair.

Dana:  Sarah, from your understanding slash that Buzzfeed listicle video, what do you imagine the pear of anguish to be? 

Sarah: Okay. So what the video told me is that I guess it's shaped like a pear and then it is metal, I guess. And what I remember from the graphic is that it's in four segments. So I assume you take this pear, you insert it. I wish that the people at home could see how many gestures I'm making. This is my most gestural episode, but you insert it into the mouth, anus, or vagina, and 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, 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, yeah, again, it seems more like execution than torture. 

Dana: Well, you said something very smart as you were describing it, which was like, if 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 device that you insert in someone's orifice and open. This historian discovered that even though by the 1860s, that's when the discussion about the pear of anguish, ah, a medieval 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. And also the latch isn't meant to open against pressure. I don't understand the mechanics, but 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 spring isn't that strong. Bishop argues that the pear probably didn't even exist. But the main purpose of it was probably as a glove or sock stretcher because it just doesn't work as a torture device. It just wasn't built that way. 

Sarah: Now I'm thinking about every object in my home being examined for whether you could stick it in someone's butt and then kill them with it. And some of them you probably could. 

Dana: The only evidence that we have that it was ever used on a person is there's a story about a criminal in Paris in the 1700s who used something like that, of that description to gag victims so they couldn't call for help. But it's something similar, it widens in your mouth so you can't scream. 

Sarah: Right? Kevin Klein did in A Fish Called Wanda with an actual pear. So there is some utility there, but.

Dana: Yeah, look at that. So that's the one historical record that we have of someone using an opening mechanism on a person, but not meant to torture. 

Sarah: Are we oh, for four at this point? How many do we have left? 

Dana: Yeah, the scold's 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 late 1560s, which is a hundred years after the latest possible iteration of the Middle Ages. I think that sometimes people see a scary metal mask and assume it was really torturous. It's still sort of in that Hillary humiliation realm, it wasn't meant to hurt you. It was just to punish women, allegedly who were perceived as gossipy. 

Sarah: Which, it is not great, but the Buzzfeed video told me that if you moved your tongue, it would be pierced by spikes. 

Dana: No spikes. It's just a bridle, like a horse bridle that was meant as a form of public humiliation. 

Sarah: It's really interesting to me that the things we're talking about, there are either inventions from later on where people are using the idea of this is what the middle-aged people did, which makes it sound like it's what people are doing in their forties, but this is what people did in the medieval times. So we are so much better, but we, through our superiority, we get to enjoy thinking about or manufacturing these fake torture objects, but we're allowed to do it in a way that is emphasizing our superiority to these imaginary people 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 or being displayed as someone who needs to be publicly shamed. I guess that like public shaming is taking the place of where we imagine a lot of other stuff occurring and, yeah. 

Dana: 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 like Madame Tussaud’s knock off torture museums are trying to get people to buy into. 

Sarah: 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. And you feel very grown up because there's a disclaimer saying that you should only, 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 live to tell the tale. And the sort of sunny, beautiful world that you're stepping into is safe in comparison. 

And I think that's how horror movies work. I think that's how scary stories work generally. And I think 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 there's a lot of scary stuff. There's a lot of torture happening around us. 

Dana: Yeah. One of the other most popular quote unquote medieval torture devices in medieval torture device, museums is the rack. Which I'm familiar with, because I feel like in a Muppets movie, Gonzo gets stretched out and then his arms and legs become long. 

Sarah: I think it was that Muppet Treasure Island. I remember he really liked it. 

Dana: 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 the Tower of London, because 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 case of 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, which we still do today. Right. 

Sarah: 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 then we're talking about the concept of torture, I feel like when we imagine medieval torture and the iron maidens, I don't think I've ever heard about it in the context of this is what they would do to you to get information out of you if that's what they needed. That it's not a utilitarian thing. It's just that people in the middle age have loved torturing.  

Dana: And there was probably like, I'm imagining like a Christian Gray torture dungeon of all these different like macabre devices side by side. Ah, if the pear of anguish doesn't work on you, we'll try the rack. 

Sarah: I'm never going to say that people are out here doing terrible things to each other every single day. I'm not denying that's always been true, but I think, I just think that people who hurt each other overwhelmingly, the person doing the harm isn't like, I'm a big torture guy. And that's what I'm into to torture, torture, torture.

Dana: The main reason that stories about medieval torture get perpetuated are because people do have macabre morbid fascination and curiosity. I think the same impulse that draws people to horror movies and true crimes is what draws people to the idea of medieval torture devices. The San Diego Museum of Man had a torture history of torture exhibit and they said that attendance at their museum rose up 60% compared to the previous year. Pulled them out of a financial hole. 

Sarah: Good for them. 

Dana: Most of the myths about medieval torture came about during the 1700, 1800s. The pre and then later Victorian era, when I think the enlightenment was happening and people were feeling very proud of themselves.

Sarah: Right. And I feel like your recent book connects with these themes, perhaps. 

Dana: Thank you. 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 the Dawn of surgery was happening. 

Sarah: I guess, I mean, looking at historical medicine, right. I feel like so much of what was done that was cutting edge at the time, no pun intended, was horrible to experience physically and 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. 

Dana: I want to leave you with one final medieval torture device before we get into the meta something called the Spanish tickler. This is just a quick Google search for Spanish Tickler. Just, look at the Google results. Let me know what you see.  

Sarah: It sounds like something I would purchase at an adult store, but here's what google says. Oh, it looks like it. Okay. I'm getting maybe no, this is a different thing, but I'm getting a preview graphic. No, this is a Spanish tickler. I'm getting a preview graphic of those things you use to make pulled pork yeah. To shred it. Yeah. Okay. So it's like a Wolverine hand, basically.

Dana: So if you look over, if you tap over to Google images, you can see that there's some artistic renderings. It's 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. The thing is, the Spanish tickler literally never existed. It was made in 2005 as a hoax article on Wikipedia. 

Sarah: That's fantastic. I mean, it sucks, but it's great. 

Dana: It's just fully made up. And yet it is in a ton of these listicles about the worst punishment and the history of mankind and most brutal torture devices.

Sarah:  I mean, I guess it goes to show that if you're out there and if you want to trick people into thinking that something existed, it would probably be pretty easy to just invent a new medieval torture device, because this is one of those. We talk on the show about things people don't need evidence to believe, and this is one of them. We're ready to believe, totally made-up stuff. If I were in this fictive, medieval torture supply company, and if I were trying to come up with a new idea, I'd be like, ah, it's spikes on a stick and it's the Spanish stick tickler. And I imagined my boss would be, this is embarrassing. You're an embarrassment. You can't just put spikes on a stick and call it an invention. 

Dana: I mean, that's why it's so funny is because it does seem like a joke. It's like those again, scratchy, hands on like an extendable pole. I guess just tear it at someone's back. It's not even creative. It's just funny. 

Sarah: Or you could make pulled pork from far away. 

Dana: Yeah, you can make carnitas. Whenever anyone listening to this hear medieval torture device, I want in their brain to think, is this actually medieval? Most of the time, it's not. 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 happened in the medieval times.  

Sarah: I feel like the fact that it sounds like it has the word evil in it has probably not done it any favors, given how we are as thinkers. 

Dana: I bet you're right, unfortunately. Again, I don't want to pretend that people in the medieval age were less brutal than us because they were horrifically brutal. Read an account of Christopher Columbus doing anything, which again is the end of the medieval period. But yeah, people are awful, but people today are also awful. And we torture people, and we execute people. And I just think we have this natural impulse to ascribe Saw-like creativity to people in the olden times that just didn't exist.

Sarah: And then we get to be like, well, everyone here who isn't literally Jigsaw is probably not that scary. And the worst things in the world can't come from a bunch of people who are all working together and being lazy about it. 

Dana: The more evil, pun intended, you make medieval torture devices, the less you have to reckon with the fact that even people doing the executions or the boring torture that did exist, still thought they were the good guys. They didn't have to do the, are we the baddies? Mitchell and Webb sketch. If you were stringing someone up in the town square in a pillory or crushing their thumbs in a boring way or burning them at the stake. 

Those people thought they were the good guys, the heroes, the same way that I think people today make excuses for capital punishment, or whatever horrific things that happen in black ops units around the world, in the name of America. But 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. 

Sarah: And that I think is the danger of lazy history is that it turns people into the past into cartoons and it allows us to inevitably be better than them because we're not letting them be real people. 

Dana: I think the takeaway is also, it's very easy for hoaxes to work. You can both get to the Chicago World's fair in 1893 with your fake iron maiden, the same way you can get your fake Spanish tickler on listicles all over the internet. You just have to be brave enough to invent something. I'm going to invent one. It's a spike that goes in your mouth. And it, it just kills you, just push it all the way down. 

Sarah: 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 of those things that everyone says Voltaire said because he's the Marilyn Monroe of the 18th century whenever he was around. But you know, the holy Roman empire is neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. So if you see a medieval torture device, ask yourself, is it medieval? Is it for torture? And finally is it a device?

And that was our episode. Thank you so much to Dana Schwartz. We 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 offender guest, Chelsea Weber Smith, 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 on literally 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.