Apex Gist

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 yea...

While  medieval torture devices  were no fun on the receiving end, it can be morbidly entertaining to read about them from the comforts of home. Strap yourselves in, because this ride gets painful, fast! To be sure, there’s nothing awesome about torture. But there’s a certain grotesque ingenuity inherent to many of the most horrifying medieval torture methods.  Not only could they cause pain, but they often played on  psychological fears , showing that even in the dark ages, the study of the mind was alive and well. It was merely being horribly misused to manipulate accused witches and dissenters against the church into confessing to crimes against God they didn’t commit. Pear of Anguish So, what is the pear of anguish? Particularly hideous, this simple mechanical torture device would be placed inside the orifice of a person and then gradually expanded. The kindest use was in a person’s mouth where it would ultimately shatter the skull, causing death. ...

Most people don’t want to hurt, torture, or kill anyone. We live our lives, go to work, try to find something that makes us happy, and hope to die a peaceful death one day when we’re very old. But there are also some really evil people out there who not only dream of harming and killing other people, but actually do it. The worst of them come up with incredibly elaborate and sadistic methods to do away with their victims and commit crimes that are so unspeakable that they go down in history and are remembered with fear for hundreds and even thousands of years. This is the case of the deranged mind (or minds) that came up with scaphism, a torture method also known as “the boats” that originated in the Persian Empire, around the 5th century B.C. It was devised to inflict as much pain and discomfort as possible for as long as the victim remained alive, and it was reserved only for people guilty of the worst crimes (for instance, murder and treason). The method consisted of trapping t...

When it comes to torture or torturing, it's often not the technique nor the device's brutality that makes it unsettling, but rather the great amount of effort and creativity (no matter how perverse it may be) put into the creation of the torture method designed to inflict maximum pain to its victim. Here are 25 of the most brutal torture techniques ever devised in history. This sure made me cringe.   1. The Brazen Bull Designed in ancient Greece, the Brazen Bull, also known as the Sicilian Bull, was a solid piece of brass with a side door that could be opened and latched. With a fire set underneath, the victim would be put inside the bull and would be slowly roasted to death. The Brazen Bull was specifically designed to amplify the screams of the victim and make them sound like the bellowing of a bull. 2. Heretics fork This torture device consists of a metal piece with 2 opposing bi-pronged forks attached to a strap. One end of the device was pushed under the victim's chin...

When we discuss crime and punishment in the past, we often instinctively think about torture. Grisly images of broken, brutalised bodies worm their way into our imaginations, especially when we’re thinking about Scotland, whose judicial system is popularly assumed to have been particularly bloodthirsty. In reality, however, the use of torture in Scottish History has been much more limited, and much more controversial, than we might expect.   The use of torture While there are some suggestions that torture was used during the Middle Ages – the assassins of King James I (d.1437) may have undergone it, for example – the ‘golden age’ of judicial torture in Scotland was the early modern era, and in particular the 17th century. But even during this period, its use was heavily regulated. In order to torture a suspected or convicted criminal – or at least, in order to do so legally – you needed to have a specific warrant from Parliament or the Privy Council. And these were rarely granted:...

Humans have long came up with methods of punishing criminals, villains, or anyone who’s unlucky enough to mess with the wrong people, at the wrong place and time. Hanging, burning, stoning, caning, those are among the popular ones, the ones we are all familiar with. But what about the ones that are just plain mad and cruel, the craziest ones? These are torture method that causes not only physical pain, but is psychologically destructive, leaves deep mental scar if not crippled for the rest of their lives or worse, death. Craziest Torture Methods of All-Time Also known as “Slow slicing” or “Death by 1000 cuts”. The convict was tied to a post and small slices are carefully made, ensuring that vital organs and arteries are not cut. Then, bits of skin and limbs were removed one at a time, slowly to ensure that they suffer through the process. Some records state that salt is poured on the wounds to make it worse for the convict. Used in China from as early as the 10th century and w...

Throughout history, women have faced  punishment  that has ranged from mild to extreme. History maintained more rigid rules than we might recognize today for women’s behavior and roles, and a step out of line might call for a cruel punishment to remind women of their positions in society. Women accused of witchcraft threatened the orderliness of Christian societies, prostitutes or adulterers threatened the sanctity of marriage, and a woman deemed too loud might just be heard more than a man. Though many of the reasons for gendered punishment remained consistent— witchcraft , promiscuity, general unruly conduct—the instruments of punishment and torture throughout history varied.  Scold’s Bridle Though scolding today may seem to be punishment enough, in 16th- and 17th-century  England  and  Scotland  a scold was a woman who disrupted the quiet of her neighborhood with gossip and slander. To tame the scold, an instrument of punishment was born....