The Iron Maiden of Nuremberg

"The maiden was a tomb-sized container with folding doors. Upon the inside of the door were vicious spikes. As the prisoner was shut inside he would be pierced along the length of his body. The talons were not designed to kill outright, however, and the pinioned prisoner was left to slowly perish in the utmost pain" (Farrington 29).

The following is a description of an iron maiden from Andrei Codrescu's novel, The Blood Countess:

Sharing the room with the rack wheel at the Thurzo was an iron maiden, a metal statue of a woman. This was a great example of this sort of object, a unique construction from one of Germany's greatest clock makers. She had breasts, arms, legs, and two faces, one in front and one in back. The front face was round, with oval eyes that peered down with a look that could be alternately filled with pity and enigmatically amused. The small mouth was finely etched with hair-thin wrinkles. The eyes in the back face were closed, but the mouth was slightly open, as if she was about to whisper something. Long fine blond hair covered her head and came down in two braids over her ears, past her waist. She was dressed in a ballooning dress of worn velvet folded thousands of times, spilling over her feet. Her bare breasts were round and shiny from the generations of furtive schoolchildren who had rubbed them on visits to the museum. Two strands of pearls and a gold necklace with a black stone on the end were draped about her curved swan's neck. She opened from the front... along a seam between her breasts that was invisible when she was closed. The trigger that caused her to open was hidden in the black stone at the end of the gold chain. When the stone was pressed, her hands moved to embrace the person who had set off the hidden mechanism. When she opened, she revealed a hollow interior with sharp iron spikes. Her arms pulled in her victim, and then she closed up, piercing her prey (Codrescu 47-48).

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Punishment, Torture, and Ordeal copyrighted 1996-1998 to Shantell Powell.