Tortured subjects : pain, truth, and the body in early modern France / Lisa Silverman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Silverman, Lisa.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Torture--France--History.

Torture.

Criminal justice, Administration of--France--History.

Criminal justice, Administration of.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (282 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

At one time in Europe, there was a point to pain: physical suffering could be a path to redemption. This religious notion suggested that truth was lodged in the body and could be achieved through torture. In Tortured Subjects, Lisa Silverman tells the haunting story of how this idea became a fixed part of the French legal system during the early modern period. Looking closely at the theory and practice of judicial torture in France from 1600 to 1788, the year in which it was formally abolished, Silverman revisits dossiers compiled in criminal cases, including transcripts of interrogations conducted under torture, as well as the writings of physicians and surgeons concerned with the problem of pain, records of religious confraternities, diaries and letters of witnesses to public executions, and the writings of torture's abolitionists and apologists. She contends that torture was at the center of an epistemological crisis that forced French jurists and intellectuals to reconsider the relationship between coercion and sincerity, or between free will and evidence. As the philosophical consensus on which torture rested broke down, and definitions of truth and pain shifted, so too did the foundation of torture, until by the eighteenth century, it became an indefensible practice.

Contents:

pt. 1. An epistemology of pain. Murder in the Rue Noue : the trials of Jean Bourdil and the legal system of old regime France. "If he trembles, if he weeps, or sighs . . ." : judges, legal manuals, and the theory of torture. "To know the truth from his mouth" : the practice of torture in the parlement of Toulouse, 1600-1788

pt. 2. Pain, truth, and the body. "The excuteur of his own life" : lay piety and the valorization of pain. "The tortur'd patient" : pain, surgery, and suffering. As if pain could draw the truth from a suffering wretch" : pain as politics.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [233]-255) and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9786612659898

9781282659896

1282659898

9780226757520

0226757528

OCLC:

646068306