Why Can’t We Look Away from Violence and Torture?

GABE SHUMWAY: We would like to start out by issuing a trigger warning. This story will be gory and discusses in depth forms of medieval torture practices. If you are listening live on the radio, this package will last for 8:12 before we move onto the rest of the show.

SHUMWAY: When I learned about King Henry VIII in school, I was told to remember his wives by saying, “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.” When you think about the French Revolution, one of the premier images is the guillotine. Even today, true crime tv shows and podcasts are all the rage and have a cult-like following. But when did this gruesomeness become so normalized?

SOPHIA CASA: In honor of this quarter’s special broadcast being Quarter Quell, we thought it fitting to look at quartering, a medieval torture practice. This was a method, primarily in England, where treasonists were quite literally ripped apart at the seams.

CASA: Our initial research on this practice left us with so many unanswered questions. Why was quartering practiced? Who came up with this idea? Why are people still fascinated by medieval torture today?

PATRICIA TURNING: It’s startling in dinner conversations when I first meet people and tell them that I do medieval crime and punishment and gruesome spectacles and those kind of things.

SHUMWAY: That’s Patricia Turning, a Professor of History at Albright College. She teaches courses on Violence and Torture in the pre-modern world, Medieval Prisons, and everything in between. She emphasized that treason was one of the worst crimes that someone could commit in Medieval England, and that quartering was reserved for these sorts of extreme crimes.

CASA: Scott Sowerby, an Associate Professor of History at Northwestern, also emphasized just how extreme quartering could be.

SCOTT SOWERBY: I think people might not realize just how gruesome quartering was.

TURNING: This would have been reserved for the worst of the worst, and so this would have been the conspirators in the Babington plot. That was the plot that was going to kill Queen Elizabeth, or the gunpowder plot. That was a plot that was going to blow up all of parliament.

SHUMWAY: But just how bad was the process of quartering itself? Obviously it was a form of torture reserved for some of the worst criminals, but what exactly did it look like?

TURNING: The first part when they tie you to a hurdle and tie you to a horse, the whole intention is not to be humane or make it comfortable, but it’s meant to keep the person alive so that you get to the next stage, which is the hanging, and when you hang them, that again is not meant to kill them, but it’s meant to kind of maximize the pain inflicted upon them.

TURNING: Right before they lost consciousness, then they would release them, then they would eviscerate them, disembowel them, castrate them

SOWERBY: That’s obviously symbolically taking away their manhood. This is happening to men. And then disemboweled, which comes out of the idea that treason was something that arose in the bowels. We sometimes talk about a gut check, or we have to do a gut check.

SOWERBY: And then the quartering happens, which is the body being torn, often by being tied to horses that are pulling in different directions into four pieces, which is called quartering,

TURNING: Agitate those horses, and have the horses shoot off in different directions, extracting the limbs in that capacity

CASA: This punishment was gruesome, but when it comes to medieval torture, we were left wondering how they got from A to B. When someone committed a crime like treason, why would you tie their limbs to horses? Why not throw them in prison or use a different method of execution?

TURNING: It’s an English phenomenon, and it’s very much a sense of England’s understanding of this great chain of being, that everything has an order, that there’s a very specific hierarchy. God controls the universe, the king controls the country, and anything like treason is seen as upsetting God’s balance, so that’s why treason was viewed as really the most heinous of these crimes.

SOWERBY: They would take the different parts of the body and display them publicly in various places. So, the head, if it happened in London, the head would be mounted on a spike on the south end of London Bridge, so that people approaching London would have to pass underneath the heads of traitors that were being displayed there.

TURNING: Quartering would have meant that they’ve sent all four of those limbs to different quarters of the country, and then put those limbs on display so that, again, this was a deterrent to kind of warn other people not even to think about challenging the monarchy or challenging the king.

SHUMWAY: Quartering wasn’t the only method of torture, either. Many point to King Henry VIII beheading two of his wives as torture, and it was. But according to Turning, this was as tame as it got.

TURNING: If you’re lucky, they decapitate you.

CASA: Yet, people are still fascinated by medieval torture, and crime and punishment in general. Today, there is true crime all over the media landscape. There are TV shows and movies that talk about medieval torture. But to Sowerby, quartering was so gory that it’s largely unrepresented in today’s media.

SOWEBY: It happened. And you can see why this isn’t ever put into… Game of Thrones is famously a very grisly show, but even Game of Thrones doesn’t want to show these details because they are so awful.

SHUMWAY: We kept trying to figure out why torture is so fascinating to the masses. These practices happened centuries ago, and yet, people all over the world keep studying them. To try and gain a better understanding, we went to a place dedicated to this very phenomenon: Chicago’s Medieval Torture Museum.

SOPHIA CASA: In 15 minutes, we are going to learn about the wonderful, wonderful world of medieval torture.

GABE SHUMWAY: I am both excited and scared. This seems like a fascinating place and I don’t understand what the fascination is necessarily, but that’s kind of what we’re here to find out.

SOPHIA CASA: Yeah, like, why out of all this time, Chicago is a big city with a lot of museums. Why do people want to spend their Saturday afternoon learning about torture?

CASA: When we entered this museum, the ambiance was clear.

[Sound of squeaking and creaking]

CASA: The sound was filled by the creaking of levers that visitors could pull on the old torture devices. To find out more about the visitors who came here, here’s museum manager Paula Malone.

PAULA MALONE: We get a lot of variety of people. People who love the macabre. People who like haunted houses. People who like history. A lot of people just in town looking for new museums, more unique museums.

SHUMWAY: Malone also implied that, while there weren’t many returning visitors, those who did come back often came with a new friend. They were eager to introduce others to this unique place.

CASA: The museum primarily contained artifacts. However, in some cases, ancient practices in some countries are still used in others.

SHUMWAY: The first documented case of this torture comes from the 15th century. This torture was applied to heretics in medieval Europe and to prisoners of war during the American-Spanish War in 1898 and the American-Philippine War in 1899 and by Japanese troops during World War II. Nowadays, this torture is still used by intelligence agencies of some countries.

CASA: Many of these exhibits were designed to be unsettling. After all, what else would you expect out of medieval torture devices? It was still unique to see just how unphased some were when looking back through history.

SHUMWAY: Sowerby believes that this normalization has simply come with time.

SOWERBY: I think that as modern people, we’ve somehow transcended the barbarity of the past. Of course, we have our own barbarous side that comes out, you know, in wartime, but it’s still, it’s a sort of self flattering, I think, ideology we have that says we’ve moved beyond this medieval torture.

SHUMWAY: Quartering as a practice was banned in England in 1870. It’s been replaced by prisons, and the U.K. currently has a full ban on the death penalty. But what ushered in this new era of punishment?

SOWERBY: Quartering was used because the state couldn’t actually track down all potential traitors. It was difficult to imprison everyone who might commit treason. So the prison replaced or sort of filled the need.

CASA: Despite quartering being an element of the past, Turning points to the cycle of history. Many say that history repeats itself, and for Turning, much of her research area can still have an impact today.

TURNING: What’s striking to me recently is a lot of things that I cover from the 12th century, the 13th century, the 14th century, a lot of those topics are frightfully relevant today, which is always, you know, I wish sometimes that things could stay in the medieval past…I think it speaks to the importance of knowing history, and the importance of doing history, and making sure that you’re aware of signs so they don’t creep up on you and have the same results.

SHUMWAY: For WNUR News, I’m Gabe Shumway.

CASA: And I’m Sophia Casa.