I have had one of those weeks where people keep showing me things in order to make me mad. And because I am a very simple person that has worked. If you show me some fake medieval nonsense, I am gonna get angry, ok? I’m like a wind up toy, except what winds me up is myths about the medieval period.
So, today I thought I would write a little bit about some of the fakes that I encountered this week and talk about why they were faked into existence in the first place. Sometimes the answer is “to invent a sort of nationalist pride”, more often it is “to be sexual but with a veneer of respectability”, and it is always “to make myself and others feel superior.” Let’s go on a journey, shall we?
An example of the first type – the fake torture implement as nationalism tool – is the so-called shame flute, or Schadandflöte.
The idea here was that during the Middle Ages in the German lands, bad musicians would be punished if they were bad by being forced to wear a heavy metal clarinet looking thing around their necks. There’s a cute modern depiction of this which circulates if you google it:
You can also find an image of a surviving example from the medieval crime museum in Rothenburg.
Now this is super cute and all. A fairly benign punishment for something that bugs people – bad public busking. But it’s also not real. How do I know that? Well, the thing about the German Lands in the medieval period – especially the later medieval period is we have great records for them. I can tell you when some thieves stole from a baggage train in the Alsatian town of Beinheim and which customers in Switzerland lost out on goods as a result. (1429, sixty-one shopkeepers, forty seven of them were women.[1]) We know when people are brought to court for yelling insults in the streets. (1385, Zurich. A woman screamed at another “You’re a more wicked whore than one from the Kratz! [The poor part of town].”[2]) We know when people get in trouble for brewing bad ale … you get the picture!
What we do not have a record of is anyone, anywhere, ever, being punished with the shame flute. Not a court document. Not a social commentary on it. Nothing. There’s just the – suspiciously very well preserved – thing at the Medieval Crime museum, as well as a few that have been auctioned off, and that’s it.
Now we do have records of laws regarding musicians at the time, and in particular in the late medieval and early modern period it is true that wandering musicians were greatly disliked. However, as Kathy Stuart has noted, this is a worry about vagrancy more generally, which was frowned upon at the time. She notes that, ‘…[travelling musicians’] mobile lifestyle was seen as sinful and threatening. Both religious and secular authorities were hostile towards transients who were not under the authority of any lord. As “masterless men: they could not readily be integrated … for they lacked the social identity that only a fixed position in the social hierarchy conferred. [However] … Musicians who settled in cities suffered no legal disabilities and were often employed by the city government and accepted as honorable citizens, at least by the authorities.’[3]
The issue with musicians here then was their vagrancy, and if you were in a town playing when you ought not be you could absolutely get in trouble – but this usually meant being expelled from town or whipped. And it had nothing to do with playing badly. Just about being a non-local.
Now this is also pretty grim! I am not here to defend being xenophobic or whatever. But it’s a far cry from publicly humiliating someone because they haven’t been practicing lately.
But why would such a story being to circulate anyway. Well, the nineteenth century is a heyday for nascent nationalism and a big part of that is a desire to look to the medieval past to explain why your nation absolutely exists. Looking to the medieval period is popular a) because it is representative of an “unspoilt” religious, unindustrialised past. It is also a time you can just sort of make stuff up about. Because everyone had decided post enlightenment, thanks to my enemy Voltaire, that the Middle Ages also sucked and were bad? So you could just say anything you wanted about them and people would eat it up.
I would argue then that the shameflute is a piece of German myth-making about their reverence for music. It’s a way of saying see, here in the land of Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach we have always respected music! It’s also a way for charlatans to sell fake antiques. Win win I guess.
Secondly, you will note that if you try to look up the shame flute online, you will find it is a sort of ouroboros which just links back to this one modern image (also displayed in the medieval crime museum) and the medieval crime museum over and over and over again. That’s right, the people who stand to make money off of you believing in this one are there, front and centre to tell you all about the very many weird ways that medieval people punished others in their societies. It’s similar to the auctions of other theoretical shame-flutes. There’s actual money involved here. Who cares if it’s real? We’re trying to get paid, baybee!!!
I am not even particularly mad about this one, because it’s all a bit harmless, but it’s interesting that such lovely outfits as classic FM have fallen for this one. And it’s sad to see people part with their hard-earned money to uphold a fake history.
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The second torture device I wanted to talk about is the so-called Iron Coffin of Lissa. According to the 1894 Dictionary of Phrase and Fable to use it … “The prisoner was laid in the coffin, and saw the iron lid creep slowly down with almost imperceptible movement— slowly, silently, but surely; on, on it came with relentless march, till, after lingering days and nights in suspense, the prisoner was at last as slowly crushed by the iron lid pressing on him.”[4]
One can also find a pretty cool etching of said torture in process by Ottmar Elliger the younger at the Wellcome Collection website, which looks a little something like this:
Now these are both cool and cute but you may also have noticed they are modern. Also if you look up Brewer’s mention of the torture device, in his entry which explains the phrase “killed by inches”, you may also notice that he’s just got a wild list of all kinds of fake tortures in there. He also notes that “Many other modes of stretching out the torment of death might easily be added. (See Iron Maiden.)”[5]
I mean yeah bro, they might! Doesn’t make ‘em real!
There’s also a cute short story on the subject by August W. Derleth in Weird Tales, the horor pulp magazine that originally published a bunch of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu stories. That’s fine in my opinion. No one is saying Weird Tales is some kind of historical record. You have fun, August.
So this, again, is one of those things that we have no actual historical records for other than the fevered imaginings of various modern people. … And it’s also one of those ones where it gets pretty sexual pretty quickly. That etching up there? See how it’s a sexy young lady in a diaphanous gown being forced into the contraption? Yeah that’s intentional. This is a way of making kink porn with some plausible deniability. It’s always a sexy girl in the contraption, innit?
There’s a lot of this about with various “medieval” torture devices. You blame medieval people for doing something gross and then make a picture of it with a half-naked girl and everyone gets to tut and shake their heads while looking at T and A. In the important words of the character James Smith from the intellectual achievement that is Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 masterpiece, “Showgirls”, ‘Here they pretend they want something else and you still show them tits and ass.’ So true James. SO TRUE. (Look IDK what you want from me here.)
Anyway, all of this brings us to our last device, which isn’t a torture one, but also isn’t real, and is sexual. It was brought to my attention by friend of the blog, the fabulous Florence H.R. Scott, who likes to make my life difficult. Anyway here you go:
Nice of this person to brand their incredibly incorrect historical content I guess?
Anyway I cannot stress enough how women of wealth did not have ‘“tounge” slaves that would “serve” them while their husbands were away’. First of all, that’s sodomy, and not an accepted practice in the Middle Ages. Now we might thing of oral sex as not real sex, but people in the medieval period absolutely did. Under absolutely no circumstances would it be considered being faithful to your husband if you just got a bunch of head (from a slave????????) while he was away. In fact, because of prohibitions against sodomy, this would be considered as serious as just shagging another guy. Depending on who you asked it was actually more serious. (Aquinas. I mean if you ask Aquinas.)
Now, to be fair, oral sex as a loophole absolutely did exist in, say, courtly love circles. However, this is a very specific environment wherein rich people who hate each other are married and trying to find a way to have a nice time without also compromising the birth line. Thus you have extra-marital affairs and a lot of oral, manual, and inter-femoral sex as a way of keeping your heirs legitimate. But it was absolutely not sex with a slave (????) that your husband approved. It was a stylised form of courtship, usually with one’s equals, or at least for the middle class and above.
Further, this isn’t medieval, European, or my business, but I would also like to point out that this whole queening chair thing is also inaccurate. Queening chairs were not for getting head, they were for giving birth. So jot that down. Friend of the blog Lindsey Fitzharris has a bit about this on her blog. Secondly, uh, both those chairs are obviously modern and not ancient. So, like, what are we doing here girl? You’re just wilding out on the internet. Stop.
All of these fakes are examples of what the author and medievalist Umberto Eco has called “shaggy medievalism”[6], or the idea that the Middle Ages is a uniquely violent and idiotic time, where violent tortures, and tortured logic about sex, prevailed. People make stuff up about the time period because it feels right to them. Ironically, the liberal way that people just make up fake artifacts and internet posts comes from a deep-seated ignorance in our own time. Fakes like this circulate because no one has bothered to learn anything about medieval history, and so they can.
Further, it’s incredibly common that people do this because it makes them feel superior. You make up medieval fake tortures so that you can congratulate yourself for not being an stupid, violent jerk like everyone who was alive for a thousand years of history, apparently. Never mind that you haven’t even bothered to look this up before you spouted off about it! You can be assured that medieval people were probably being gross mean and dirty. You can just feel it.
This is then parlayed into a way for people to gain from the gullibility of others. Whoever faked and the displayed the first shame flute made money off of ignorance. The Medieval Crime Museum and various auction houses are doing the same thing. Ottmar Elliger sold sexy pictures of fake tortures to make a living. And the trap witch is making fake posts for online credibility, which can be parlayed into money. Everyone here has something to gain from their fakes, and the ignorance of others.
None of this is life or death stuff. It’s not really hurting anyone to pretend that there was an iron coffin, or a shame flute, or a special chair for giving head. (What’s wrong with a bed guys? Or just a regular ass chair? You know, a piece of furniture you already own??? Why would medieval people be out here making cuck chairs????? Sorry. Still mad I guess.) However, it does perpetuate our own ignorance. It gives us a reason to keep ignoring medieval history and the lessons we should be learning from it in favour of silly stories you can tell around a campfire.
As a general rule of thumb, if it seems too weird to be true, it isn’t, and someone is probably scamming you. Sorry to be Captain Bringdown. (I am not.)
[1] Erika Uitz, Women in the Medieval Town, London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1990), p. 44.
[2] Staatsarchiv Zürich, BVI, 192, f. 264r: ‘du bis ein boser hurr den eini im kratz und was du hest dz hest mit grossen uneren’.
[3] Kathy Stuart, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). pp. 24-25.See also Wolfganag Hartung, Die Spielleute. Eine Randgruppe in der Gesellshaft des Mittlealters, (Wiesbaden, 1982), pp. 30-46.
[4] “Killed by Inches”, E. Cobham Brewer, The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, (London: Cassell, Pettir, and Galpin, 1894). https://www.infoplease.com/dictionary/brewers/killed-inches <Accessed 24 May 2024>
[5] Ibid.
[6] Umberto Eco, “‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’: An unpublished fragment” Semiotica, vol. 63, no. 1-2, 1987, pp. 239-239. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.1987.63.1-2.239
For more on myths about the medieval period, see:
No “the Church” did not kill Joan of Arc, you credulous dullards
JFC calm down about the medieval Church
On cats
There’s no such thing as the Dark Ages, but OK
You are not, in fact, the granddaughter of the witches they couldn’t burn
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My book, The Once And Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society, is out now.
© Eleanor Janega, 2024
Going Medieval 