Curiosa: Peinliche Gerichtsordnung

[nebroadwe]

For the next two years I will be working under a grant to catalog around 12,000 volumes (not all by myself, of course!) of a collection dedicated to medieval and early modern European secular and ecclesiastical history and law, with side-helpings of magic and the Inquisition. One of the buzz-creating items of this project is a contemporary copy of the Constitutio Criminalis Theresiana, the revised penal code promulgated by the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa in 1768, as part of a push during this part of her reign to bring uniformity to the administration of the law. Our copy was printed in Vienna by Johann Thomas Edlen von Trattnern in 1769 and looks to have been rebound since then, but does not appear to have been cut down and, remarkably, has all of its plates intact. This has generated a lot of interest among my fellow librarians, not just because it increases the monetary and scholarly value of the object, but because the plates in question compose a section of the work containing a

Beschreibung deren Peinigungsarten,
wie selbe in der koenigl. boehmischen Hauptstadt Prag
bey den daselbstigen Stadt-Magistraten vorgenommen werden.

which is to say, a

description of the methods of torture,
[and] how the same in the royal Bohemian capital city of Prague
were employed by its magistrates.

Technically speaking, the engravings are gorgeous -- crisp and clear, with what one of my colleagues describes as "an Ikea sensibility" in their depiction of the construction and use of the rack, the thumbscrew and the Spanish boot. You could probably tab-A-into-slot-B a thumbscrew yourself from these plates, and certainly go on to thumb-A-into-thumbscrew-B, if you so desired. It's a perverse display of Enlightenment rationalism -- torture as scientifically anatomized tool, to be employed in particular ways to elicit particular results time after time. (There's an accompanying section of the code defining the situations in which torture may be applied that I'm still slogging through for context -- my eighteenth-century legal German isn't quite up to this text, even with the Latin side-notes). The level of clinical detail is astonishing only to the extent that one isn't used to seeing this sort of thing treated as how-to rather than horror. Five plates in a row are devoted to the rack, for instance, from a diagram of its working parts, to the proper way to attach someone to it, and on through the operation of the instrument, including the helpful advice that one torturer needs to stand next to the victim and keep an arm under the small of his back to maintain the proper stress on the shoulder joint (see Figure III).

Fortunately, within a decade this section of the work became an anachronism, as Maria Theresa outlawed judicial torture (her son, Joseph II, went on to ban capital punishment). And, to be fair, nine-tenths of the work sets forth the minutiae of a formal law code, while only one-tenth describes interrogation techniques. It is no less valuable as a source of legal history than it is as a record of man's ingenious inhumanity to man -- neither of which we do well to forget.