Holiday Snaps!

[Sethomas]

I kinda want to go to the torture museum just to evaluate the opinion I already have of it based on televised tours I've seen. At least, on at least one History Channel special they went through it and the curator was showing off things and talking about them as if they were legitimate pieces of historical torture when a number of them were the product of latter-day imagination. I've seen that museum referenced in high regard, so I would HOPE that they take historicity seriously.

What I mean is that a huge number of torture devices purportedly dating to the Middle Ages never showed up in descriptions, allusions, drawings, or actual examples until hundreds of years later and in the totally wrong area for their purported uses. Even as these things are taken seriously by macabre enthusiasts and textbooks, most historians believe that the vast majority of them were invented mostly in Prussia and Flanders during the Enlightenment either as curiosities or propaganda. It was a popular practice to discredit institutions at that time, most often the Catholic Church or specific royal dynasties, to poke at their history of brutality. When the historical record was missing to help out, they'd just make shit up. You'd have people in Holland suddenly "discovering" relics all the time from three hundred years earlier and half the continent away with no attempt at an explanation of why some random guy had them in his basement.

This is frustrating for academia because it makes it very hard to discern what is historical and what's not in terms of torture, especially with the Spanish Inquisition. We can read the fairly-well documented Inquisition records and get some idea, but even though the vast majority of torture victims in that episode did survive (later redactors of the records didn't distinguish between people burned "at the stake" and people burned "in effigy") we don't really have much word on what happened outside of these records. So, we have to wonder how honest they were. Since the Spanish Inquisition took all of maybe five years to be (sadly, ineffectually) denounced by the Church, it wouldn't surprise me if things were worse than they admitted to--but we have no way of knowing.