Tortured Subjects

Resisting Silences: Gender and Family Trauma in Eighteenth‐Century England

“…Masculinity and personal character were also visible on the men's bodies, reflecting a wider understanding that bodily deportment bared one's soul. 61 Newdigate stressed his embodiment of age and rank throughout the pamphlet. There are sixteen references to him as a gentleman, while his actions revealed innate gentility: caring for his family, discovering a traitor, or building lucrative coal works.…”

Historicizing waterboarding as a severe torture norm

“…In 1726 a certain Jean Bourdil was forced to endure the estrapade four times, followed by the question extraordinaire (question d'eau) five times, during which his face was 'covered by a linen napkin' and as much as sixteen liters of water was poured into his throat. 103 Earlier references to waterboard-like torture can be found in European legal treatises from the late fourteenth century. Bonifacius de Vitalinis (d. 1388) described when a victim has 'had cold water poured…into his nose, or was subjected to the legscrew, as is very often done'.…”

“…The greater the height of the trestle, the more acute was the angle of the victim's body and the more severe the pain when water was applied to the face. 107 Interrogations always began on the 'small trestle'; if it was deemed necessary, they were then escalated to the 'large trestle', on which victims could be subjected to multiple sessions. 108 In contrast to the rather oblique and opaque references to water torture found in the French legal records, the Westminster Chronicle offers a rare and explicit description of waterboarding being practised in England during the 1380s.…”

“…In spite of these precautions, when French jurists rewrote the criminal code in 1670, they 'expressed two specific objections' to torture (which commonly included waterboarding): that it did cause permanent physical harm and that it did not obtain the truth. 90 Slaves, criminals, heretics, Jews, the poor and the 'base' were among those most likely to be tortured, even as witnesses. These internal "others", existing on the periphery of "civilized" society, were deemed inherently untrustworthy and subject to different treatment.…”

“…In 1651 the diarist John Evelyn was illegally admitted into the Chatelet de Paris to witness a torture session, describing the prisoner as being 'to all appearances dead with paine' after the waterboard. 120 Perhaps most indicative of the severity of waterboarding is the pain produced by what was deemed the "lesser" torture of the estrapade. Records from seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Toulouse tell us that one prisoner was 'raised' by the estrapade twice, and this was enough for him to exclaim: 'You're killing me wrongly'; another begged for death after being 'raised' three times.…”