Sara Beam

Torture is an issue of compelling interest today. Contemporary examination of past and present practices in the Americas and in Europe testifies to the moral and political unease that “enhanced interrogation techniques” can arouse. Understanding how torture has been applied in the past and, more importantly, when authorities resist its application is useful knowledge. My research examines a transition point when the practice of judicial torture was reevaluated and substantially curtailed in Western Europe: the century between 1550 and 1650.
In the late eighteenth century, many Western European governments formally outlawed torture, largely as a response to the humanitarian critiques of Enlightenment philosophers. But the practical disengagement from this method of interrogation had begun much earlier, before 1650, when judges across Europe became more hesitant to use it. Until recently, historians who focus on the intellectual debates and legislative changes of the 1700s have overlooked this much earlier shift in European judicial practice. My project, by examining the practice and mindset of European judges a century before torture was actually outlawed, seeks to re-define the period between 1550 and 1650 as the more significant turning point.
This seeming contradiction, between the continuing legality of torture in early modern Europe and a growing reluctance to practice it, can be best resolved by looking at how, when and why torture was applied at individual courts. My methodology has been to privilege documents that describe practice, such as extant criminal trials, over theoretical discussions. Criminal records are mediated documents that can never objectively represent what occurred in the torture chamber. Nevertheless, because they are documents that are shaped by judges and by their scribes to represent their practice of justice as fair and as legal, they are particularly useful for understanding the worldview of the judges themselves. As a result, it is possible to analyze both quantitatively and qualitatively criminal trial records from a number of communities with different political, religious confessional allegiances. My research suggests that, despite local variations, an overall trend toward limiting the use of torture occurred throughout Western Europe by 1650. This trend away from practicing torture was shaped by both religious considerations and by concerns about the truth value of confessions produced by torture.