Torture And How It Affected The Western World Today

Torture

In my essay, I will be talking about torture in the renaissance and how it affected the western world today. Torture was used as punishment and a form of interogation which has obviously been abandoned since it is very inhuman and wrong. It also doesn't work the way they thought it would. The three types of torture i will be talking about in my essay is rat torture, the brazen bull and the pear of anguish. The renaissance is the rebirth of classical thinking. What historians believe was the main reason for the renaissance is the black death and the peasants revolt. The black death (bubonic plague) was a plague that lasted from 1446 to 1450, and killed around ⅓ of the population of europe. It was a gruesome horrible death. An Italian

The most common form of rat torture was putting a upside down bucket full of starving rats on your abdomen. The torturer would then put hot stones on the top of the bucket. Rats will do anything to survive and since the heat eventually became unbearable for the rats, they would try and scratch their way out. The only way out however, was the victim's stomach. They would dig through the guts of the victim. The torturer would then lift the bucket and the rats out of your ripped, raw, mangled wreck of a stomach and pour in the hot stones. Another form of this type of torture was cutting open the victim, and then stuffing starved rats in these holes. This would also be performed in the abdomen. This would go on until the victim had died this awful death and it is debated on if this is the worst form of torture that renaissance torturers practiced. This is obviously very wrong and barbaric, and this we know

In my opinion this is the most gruesome and awful form of torture. It was also known as the mouth pear or the choke pear, as it was often used in the mouth. This form of torture was reserved for women, homosexuals, and liars. If you had lied it would go in your mouth, if you were a woman it would be inserted in your genitals, and the same for homosexuals. The device itself was a pear-shaped metal mechanism divided into spoon-like segments that can be spread apart with a spring or by turning a key. It is debated whether or not this was a plausible torture method since all of the pears from the renaissance close with a key instead of open. It was intended to mutilate you so you could not lie or perform homosexual/lustful acts anymore. Whether this was real or not I find it to be extremely gruesome, not only for the fact of the mutilation but the slow nature of the device. This way of punishment is too gruesome to be practiced