Medieval torture...how bad?

[Watchman]

Torture was mostly employed as a punishement anyway, particularly for crimes that were for one reason or another considered particularly heinous such as patri- or regicide. It was meant to set a cautionary example, although in practice the common folk tended to treat it as a sort of public spectacle and its sheer nastiness often afforded the one being punished a certain degree of sympathy which wasn't really the intention. Foucault's Observe and Punish or however it now is called in English has a famous and lenghty discourse on the topic; the case he discusses happens in, if I recall correctly, mid-1700s or so, on the side casually demonstrating that horrid torture as a legal remedy was by far not a merely Medieval concept.

The Inquisition was actually pretty boring. They had a few, simple, painful, not particularly savage tricks they relied on, and never came even close to the disturbing ingenuity the temporal authorities displayed. Then again, the Holy Office used torture as an interrogation method in particularly severe or deadlocked cases and not as a straight means of corporal punishement, so they had pretty good reasons not to be overly bloodthirsty - the least of which wasn't the fact that the person interrogated usually *wasn't* executed at some point afterwards, and unnecessarily crippling a fellow Christian would hardly be a very pious or proper thing to do.
The Inquisition was overall a far less dreadful bunch than the popular image has it. For example most of the time if an Inquisitor (or for that matter a higher temporal justice organ) got involved in a witch trial the suspect walked away free, as both normally required certain minimum standards of evidence to prosecute.

In the Middle Ages the folks who burned at stake were mainly heretics and suchlike; I understand death-by-combustion was actually specifically reserved for irredeemable heretics and the like, most of the others burned were first killed by some other means and only their corpse burned afterwards.

All that said, the people of old clearly did have a rather different perception of physical pain than we do. A fair bit of psychohistorical research has gone into examining why for example it was perfectly normal in country fairs for kids to tie cats to sticks and grill them alive, why public spectacles of wanton cruelty to animals were popular entertainment, and why the legal punishements on the average were decidedly several orders of magnitude more brutal than ours (the much-maligned Islamic sharia with its emphasis on amputating offending body parts - a thief's hand or a rapist's genitals, for example - is actually pretty tame compared to its European Medieval contemporaries; it merely seems unusually cruel by our time's standards).