Blood on the Ravenstone: Judicial Torture, Penal Violence, and Capital Punishment in Early Modern Europe

This week we’re delving into penal violence in early modern Europe. For most people, we suspect, their familiarity with torture, corporal punishment, and execution for capital crime is confined to some gnarly anecdotes, perhaps a few graphic movie scenes, a little Monty Python, and, if you’re cool like us, your high school history project about medieval torture devices. But everything has a history and those things barely scratch the surface. 


Legal historians have been uncovering, measuring, and analyzing capital punishment for decades and today we want to share some of what they’ve found.
Marissa: One pleasant May day in 1704, Agnes


 Catherina Schickin was walking through a village in Tubingen, Germany where she stopped and asked a villager for a glass of milk. After finishing her milk, she thanked the good Samaritan and continued her stroll. She approached a group of young boys and asked one of them to accompany her up the road to give her directions back home. A seven year old boy named Hans Michael Furch agreed to show her the way after she promised him a gift. The other boys, at first, insisted on coming too but she convinced them to stay behind. 

Agnes and the boy walked along a path in the nearby forest, which was bustling with hunters, travelers, and woodsmen. As they walked, they chatted, rested, and played games. One witness saw her affectionately delousing his hair, an intimate act often performed between mother and son. Eventually, the boy asked to go home. It was then that Schickin angrily threw him to the ground and, ignoring his pleas for forgiveness, sliced open his throat with a knife she’d been carrying in her pocket. His throat was sliced so deeply that she later testified that she could “look down into his neck.” Leaving him bleeding to death in the forest, Agnes walked to the next town and presented herself to the next people she saw.

Averill: She went compliantly with the town’s imperial Vogt (kind of like a constable in early modern Germany) who took her to jail. She told onlookers confidently that “now the hangman would surely dispatch [her].” Agnes cooperated, making judicial torture unnecessary. During the Vogt’s investigation, he discovered that six years ago, she had slept with a soldier in the forest. Because she declined to be in a relationship with him afterward, he cursed her. Agnes told the Vogt that she “no longer felt right.” She suspected the devil had possessed her. Her neighbors testified to her sudden sexual promiscuity and other strange behaviors since the curse. 

Agnes had attempted suicide several times and spent time being treated by a barber-surgeon after one of those attempts. During her period of distress, she also worked as a beggar in the countryside. After discovering that Agnes’s father had taken his own life in the forest long ago the jurists in charge of Agnes’s trial concluded that she suffered from melancholy which she had inherited from her father. Instead of execution, Agnes was sentenced to whipping and confinement in a poorhouse where she would receive medical care and religious counsel. 

Marissa: For most people, I suspect, their familiarity with torture, corporal punishment, and execution for capital crime is confined to some gnarly anecdotes, perhaps a few graphic movie scenes, a little Monty Python, and, if you’re cool like me, your high school history project about medieval torture devices. But everything has a history and those things barely scratch the surface. Legal historians have been uncovering, measuring, and analyzing capital punishment for decades and today I want to share some of what they’ve found. 
Marissa: The murder of Hans Michael Furch by Agnes Catherina Schickin was researched and and translated by historian Kathy Stuart. In many ways, this is a surprising story. Non-historians tend to believe that our world is more violent now than it has ever been. As the story goes, it was the 1970s that brought the birth of the “serial killer,” and that 1990s, the video games and movies that desensitize us to appalling violence. But we historians know different, especially early modernists like me. Early modern Europe was an incredibly violent place, and not just during war time. Rapists, child-killers, violent sociopaths, they’ve been around forever

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