Iron maiden

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This article is about the supposed torture device. For the band, see Iron Maiden. For other uses, see Iron Maiden (disambiguation).
Various neo-medieval torture instruments. An iron maiden stands at the right.

The iron maiden was a presumed torture device, consisting of an iron cabinet with a hinged front and spike-covered interior, sufficiently tall to enclose a human being.

History

The iron maiden is often associated with the Middle Ages.[1] However, no account has been found earlier than 1793, although medieval torture devices were catalogued and reproduced during the 19th century. Wolfgang Schild, a professor of criminal law, criminal law history, and philosophy of law at the University of Bielefeld, has argued that putative iron maidens were pieced together from artifacts found in museums to create spectacular objects intended for (commercial) exhibition.[2] Several 19th-century iron maidens are on display in museums around the world, including the San Diego Museum of Man,[3] the Meiji University Museum,[4] and multiple torture museums[5][6][7] in Europe. It is unlikely that any of these iron maidens were ever employed as instruments of torture.

The original 17th-century iron maidens may have been constructed as probable misinterpretation of a medieval Schandmantel ("coat of shame" or "barrel of shame"),[citation needed] which was made of wood and metal but without spikes.[8] Inspiration for the iron maiden may also have come from the Carthaginian execution of Marcus Atilius Regulus as recorded in Tertullian's "To the Martyrs" (Chapter 4) and Augustine of Hippo's The City of God (I.15), in which the Carthaginians "packed him into a tight wooden box, spiked with sharp nails on all sides so that he could not lean in any direction without being pierced",[9] or from Polybius' account of Nabis of Sparta's deadly statue of his wife, the Iron Apega.[10][11]

The iron maiden of Nuremberg

The most famous iron maiden that popularized the design was that of Nuremberg, first displayed possibly as far back as 1802. The original was lost in the Allied bombing of Nuremberg in 1944. A copy "from the Royal Castle of Nuremberg", crafted for public display, was sold through J. Ichenhauser of London to the Earl of Shrewsbury in 1890 along with other torture devices, and, after being displayed at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893, was taken on an American tour.[12] This copy was auctioned in the early 1960s and is now on display at the Medieval Crime Museum, Rothenburg ob der Tauber.[13]

Historians have ascertained that Johann Philipp Siebenkees created the history of it as a hoax in 1793. According to Siebenkees' colportage, it was first used on August 14, 1515, to execute a coin forger.[14]

The iron maiden of Nuremberg was anthropomorphic, probably styled after primitive "Gothic" representations of Mary, the mother of Jesus, with a cast likeness of her on the face. It was about 7 feet (2.1 m) tall and 3 feet (0.91 m) wide, had double doors, and was big enough to contain an adult man. Inside the tomb-sized container it had dozens of sharp spikes.[citation needed]

Cultural influence of the Iron Maiden

The British heavy metal band Iron Maiden was named after the torture device.[15]

Iron Maiden was the name given to a research tool for experiments in submerging a human body in water to alleviate the effects of high-g acceleration, at the Aviation Medical Acceleration Laboratory (AMAL) of the Johnsville Naval Air Development Center. In 1958, researcher R. Flanagan Gray survived 31.25 Gs for five seconds using AMAL's Iron Maiden.[16]

In 2003, Time magazine reported that an iron maiden was found outside the Iraqi Football Association office of Uday Hussein in Iraq.[17]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Vortrag Klaus Graf: "Das Hinrichtungswerkzeug "Eiserne Jungfrau" ist eine Fiktion des 19. Jahrhunderts, denn erst in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts hat man frühneuzeitliche Schandmäntel, die als Straf- und Folterwerkzeuge dienten und gelegentlich als "Jungfrau" bezeichnet wurden, innen mit eisernen Spitzen versehen und somit die Objekte den schaurigen Phantasien in Literatur und Sage angepaßt." ("The execution tool "Iron Maiden" is a fiction of the 19th century, because only since the first half of the 19th Century the early-modern-times' "rishard cloaks", which sometimes were called "maidens", were provided with iron spikes; and thus the objects were adapted to the dreadful fantasies in literature and legend.") Mordgeschichten und Hexenerinnerungen - das boshafte Gedächtnis auf dem Dorf, June 21, 2001 accessed July 11, 2007.
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ Translation by Gerald G. Walsh, S.J., Demetrius B. Zema, S.J., Grace Monahan, O.S.U., and Daniel J. Honan.
  10. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. ↑ Pomeroy, Sarah B. Spartan Women, "Elite Women, The Last Reformers: Apega and Nabis and Chaeron" Oxford University Press US (2002), pp. 89–90, 198 pages, Books.Google.com, ISBN 0-19-513067-7 and ISBN 978-0-19-513067-6.
  12. ↑ "Famous torture instruments: the Earl of Shrewsbury's collection soon to be exhibited here", The New York Times, 26 November 1893 accessed 20 June 2009, refers particularly only to the "justly-celebrated iron maiden".
  13. ↑ It was notably absent from the remainder of the collection, auctioned at Guernsey's, New York, in May 2009 (Richard Pyle, Associated Press, "For sale in NYC: torture devices").
  14. ↑ Wolfgang Schild, Die Eiserne Jungfrau, 2002
  15. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  17. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

Further reading

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External links

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