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

• Autore: Silverman Lisa
• Pubblicazione: Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, 2001
• Edizione: 1st ed.
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (282 p.)
• Disciplina: 364.6/7
• Soggetto topico: Torture - France - History; Criminal justice, Administration of - France - History
• Soggetto non controllato: early modern, time period, era, france, french, europe, european, body, history, historical, academic, scholarly, research, suffering, pain, physical, redemption, religion, trauma, theory, theoretical, true story, torture, 1600s, 1700s, 18th century, illegal, crime, criminal, transcript, interrogation, physician, surgeon, witness, execution, apologist, abolitionist, activist
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. [233]-255) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: 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.
• Sommario/riassunto: 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.
• Titolo autorizzato: Tortured subjects
• ISBN: 1-282-65989-8; 9786612659898; 0-226-75752-8
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 9910808780403321
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II