Witchcraft by Gaskill Malcolm;

Author:Gaskill, Malcolm;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Pain and fire

The gallery of images that makes up popular knowledge of the witch-hunt is incomplete without the torture chamber: a dungeon full of baroque contraptions for inflicting pain. This picture was refined in waves of Protestant propaganda where it illustrated perfectly the cruelty of Catholic Inquisitions. More recently, horror films and attractions such as London Dungeon have kept this ghastly scenario alive in popular culture, barely vitiated by the celebrated Monty Python sketch.

Torture is so abhorrent to civilized people that there’s a danger of misunderstanding its history. In March 2009, British newspapers reported how a suspected terrorist was subjected to ‘medieval torture’ in Morocco with the connivance of the secret service. The moral repugnance of this is plain, but in history things are rarely that simple. Torture calls for an ‘emic’ interpretation, a relativistic approach. This may offend. But as with rejecting evil as historical explanation, and insisting on precise statistics, to understand is not the same as to condone. Good historians neither condemn nor make excuses for their subjects: readers can do that for themselves.

Like propaganda, gruesome dramas and museum tableaux omit the context necessary to appreciate what was going on. Voyeurs of suffering may not care; but it matters what torturers actually did, and thought they were doing, to understand why such practices were institutionalized. Today, although torture may be widespread, at least its secrecy indicates that it is politically taboo, a prima facie breach of human rights. One of the hardest things to explain to students is why the use of torture – ‘getting medieval’, to quote Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction – was once a progressive technique to prevent miscarriages of justice. In some ways, torture belongs to the modern rather than medieval era in that it reflected optimism that truth, untainted by malice, might be discovered without recourse to superstition. Torture was an important part of Roman-canonical inquisitorial procedure, an innovation to banish ordeals and local customs in criminal suits. Justice, like science and history, could be empirical.

Torture was arranged in grades of severity. Operatives were meant to be skilled because they obeyed inquisitors seeking truth without causing unnecessary suffering. The mildest form was the territio – merely showing a suspect the instruments of torture. In 1657, Tereshka Malakurov and his wife Olenka were questioned about witchcraft in the Russian town of Lukh, ‘in the torture chamber, in sight of the instruments of torture’; the territio was also used on Kepler’s mother. In both cases, the accused continued to deny the charges; but this might not have been seen as obstinacy, rather as good evidence given the solemnity under which it was extracted. In Rothenburg ob der Tauber, torture was used on accusers to ensure their honesty and to deter malicious time-wasters. Many states felt accusatory justice to be obsolete because it encouraged neighbourhood conspiracies while invoking divine adjudication.

Humans are fascinated by horror and suffering; perhaps at some deep psychological level, torture dares us to peek at hell on earth. Several European cities now have museums of torture into which tourists can wander.

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