An Iron Maiden on display at the Torture Museum in Zielona Góra, Poland. Wikimedia Commons.
17. The Iron Maiden was not a real torture device and much of what we believe about Medieval executions and punishments is untrue
The Iron Maiden – a human-sized box containing an array of interior spikes – is an infamous torture device. Sealing a victim inside, the spikes pierce the individual in non-vital places leading to a slow, agonizing death. Yet despite appearing in several museums around the world, the history of the device is almost certainly fictitious. The first reference to the contraption originated from German philosopher Johann Philipp Siebenkees in the late-18th century, detailing a fake account regarding the execution of a coin forger in 1515 at Nuremberg. Following this hoax story, Matthew Peacock created a working iron maiden in the early 1800s and sold his invention to a museum.
More broadly, much of what we imagine about medieval torture and punishment is highly inaccurate. The rack, using ropes to stretch an individual’s body in opposite directions, was not widespread until the religious persecutions of late-16th century Elizabethan England. Public beheadings were not a common spectacle, with execution by the ax regarded as a privileged method reserved for members of the nobility and conducted in private. Whilst capital punishment was not itself uncommon, those so sentenced often merely faced the hangman’s noose, whilst parole or banishment served as a far more common punishment.