HEARTBREAKING NEWS💔 Iron maidens may be coming to an end because of the severe disagreement between the new and old maidens over..
The Iron Maiden is perhaps one of the most recognizable medieval torture devices of all time, thanks in large part to its prominence in films, television shows, and cartoons like Scooby-Doo. As far as torture devices go, though, the Iron Maiden is really quite simple.
It is a human-shaped box, decorated on the inside with incredibly sharp spikes that would, presumably, impale through the victim on either side when the box was shut. But the spikes were not long enough to kill a person outright — rather, they were short and placed in such a way that the victim would die a slow and agonizing death, bleeding out over time.The first written reference to the Iron Maiden didn’t appear until the late 1700s, long after the Middle Ages had come to an end. And while torture most certainly existed during the Middle Ages, many historians have argued that medieval torture was much simpler than later accounts would imply.
The collapse of the Holy Roman Empire led to a sharp decline in technical capacity and material culture as the infrastructure that the Romans had installed came to a near-total collapse. Suddenly, Europeans could no longer rely on the mass production of Roman factories and on Rome’s complex commerce systems.
Instead, everything became smaller in scale. Pottery was rough and homemade. Luxury goods were no longer traded over long distances. This is why the Middle Ages were often referred to as the “Dark Ages” by certain scholars — it seemed as if everything was in a state of decline.
Basically, starting in the 14th century, some Italian scholars viewed the history of the world in three distinct phases: the Classical Age, when the ancient Greeks and Romans were at the height of wisdom and power; the Renaissance, the age in which these scholars lived and things were generally on the up and up; and everything in between, the Middle Ages.
As British historian Janet Nelson explained in the History Workshop Journal, these writers believed “theirs was a time of reborn classical culture, they rescued Greek from near-oblivion, removed errors from Latin, cleared fog from philosophy, crassness from theology, crudeness from art.”
Therefore, all of those pesky years between the Classical Age and the Renaissance were deemed an uncivilized, barbaric time in history — and so many torture devices that were used much later or much earlier became associated with the Middle Ages
The first mention of the Iron Maiden actually came from 18th-century writer Johann Philipp Siebenkees, who described the device in a guidebook to the city of Nuremberg.
In it, he wrote of a 1515 execution in Nuremberg in which a criminal was allegedly placed in a device reminiscent of a sarcophagus lined on the inside with sharp
