Book Review

Rack, Rope and Red Hot Pincers

by Geoffrey Abbott

     What an amazing thing human ingenuity is. Well, maybe not. For every amazing accomplishment our species makes, there seems to be something awful that happens in its shadow. We’ve built skyscrapers, computers, airplanes, and cured diseases. But we’ve also created the nuclear bomb and the American government. And our penal codes have a long-standing tradition of using torture as a means of punishment or for the use of extracting confessions from suspects. Rack, Rope and Red Hot Pincers by Geoffrey Abbott is a cute little book that catalogs and details the devices and methods of torture, most of which were employed in the Middle Ages, yet the narrative does extend into the twentieth century at times. You may want to ask yourself why you would want to read this when there are so many other books to choose from.

Geoffrey Abbott writes popular history books, most of which are related to medieval England and the Tower of London. As a historian, he appears to be a hobbyist more than an academic. He lays out the scheme of the book according to categories like use of straps, weights, racks, water torture, amputations and mutilations, and there is even an entire chapter, my personal favorite, dedicated to whips and flogging. The final chapter is about the ultimate punishment, the death penalty, and the variety of sadistic ways that it has been carried out. If you haven’t read this, you can imagine what kinds of details are used to fill in each chapter. It’s all written with minimal commentary, presenting the bare facts alone, with occasional puns and jokes, none of which are funny.

While the myriad ways in which pain is inflicted can be somewhat interesting for the morbidly minded, it is the context of the torture that interested me the most. Everything in this book is something done by law enforcement either to punish criminals or force them to admit to crimes. Often the crimes they confessed to were not committed by them and sometimes they were forced to implicate innocent people while under conditions of extreme distress. It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out that a person being pierced with needles, crushed by stones, skinned with hot pincers, or having their limbs dislocated while being stretched on a rack will say anything the interrogator wants to hear in order to get the pain to stop. And yet these things are still going on in our supposedly more enlightened times; the Bush administration allowed for “enhanced interrogation techniques” to be used in the War on Terror including sleep deprivation, physically exhausting postures, solitary confinement, exposure to dangerous animals, and water boarding, the latter being a torture technique that was invented and frequently used in the dungeons of medieval Europe. So despite what they say on Fox News, it really is a form of torture. Of course, this book was written before the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but the author would certainly have said something about that if he had written this at a later time or revised this edition. He does mention the use of torture in American prisons like Leavenworth, where the idiomatic phrase “being put on the spot” comes from, as well as methods of administering corporal punishment in America.

Another issue of note regarding the context of torture is how many people were imprisoned and tortured for the crime of heresy. About half of the methods described in this short book were inflicted for the purpose of disagreeing with church doctrine, practicing witchcraft, or simply being suspected of saying or doing something that ran counter to the religious principles of the day. The prosecution of religious heresies were largely in the hands of law enforcement. You have to wonder what is wrong with a society that allows the police to amputate a man’s tongue, cut off his nose, and gouge out his eye because he prefers to pray silently rather than aloud. In modern times, this would be considered a thought crime and it looks as though the worst criminals were employed by the police to punish such harmless transgressions and victimless crimes with the most sadistic cruelty imaginable. When the church could not control people’s minds, they turned them over to the government to control their bodies through extreme acts of cruelty.

Most of the other crimes that could get you tortured in the past were petty crimes like theft or public drunkenness. You could also be publicly disemboweled for insulting a member of the nobility. Of course, torture was a special punishment reserved for use against the lower classes, although admittedly there were some cases in which monarchs were beheaded due to political power struggles. Friedrich Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of Morals, explained that the powerful classes need to express their power through acts of cruelty and violence, sometimes as a public spectacle, so the weaker members of society will receive a visual reminder of who has the most control. The practice of governing is inherently violent to its subjects and such cruelty needs to be displayed so we know what side of the fence we are on. Punishment is the right and the domain of the ruling class and those who take violence into their own hands are punished for crossing that line, not because of the pain and suffering they caused to others.

But Abbott didn’t intend this book to be a commentary on political theory, criminal justice, class conflict, or the irrationality of the human race. It is simply a book that describes torture in all its glorious forms. As such, for scholars, it works as a good source book, giving details of things that are often glossed over by historians covering more conventional themes in historical tomes. There might be times when reading medieval history where you wonder what is meant by thumbscrews or the strappado and the author doesn’t bother to explain because they are more concerned with the narrative at a macro level. I myself had never know what it means to be drawn and quartered until I read this book, despite having come across the term in dozens of other history books I have read.

As for why I read this book, I’ll simply have to say it was a matter of morbid curiosity. Aside from a handful of kinks that turn me on in the boudoir, and possibly the geeky delight I get from teaching syntax classes, I’m not especially inclined to inflicting pain on my fellow human beings, even when their stupidity disgusts me. But I remember going to a carnival funhouse when I was a kid. They had one room labeled the torture chamber with racks, whips, chains on the wall, and a swinging pendulum, made out of cardboard no less, right out of Edgar Allan Poe. A strobe light was flickering while they played a vinyl sound effects record of people moaning while iron chains clinked, wind blew, doors creaked, and cats screeched. The record was stuck and the carnies weren’t paying any attention so I laughed it all off and moved on. And here I am, decades later reading Rack, Rope and Red Hot Pincers.