Iron maiden

While often popularly thought to have been used in the medieval period, the first stories citing the iron maiden were composed in the 19th century.

Despite its reputation as a medieval instrument of torture, there is no evidence of the existence of iron maidens before the 19th century.

The 19th-century iron maidens may have been constructed as a misinterpretation of a medieval Schandmantel, which was made of wood and metal but without spikes.

[9] Inspiration for the iron maiden may also have come from the Carthaginian execution of Marcus Atilius Regulus as recorded in Tertullian's "To the Martyrs" (Chapter 4) and Augustine of Hippo's The City of God (I.15), in which the Carthaginians "shut him into a tight wooden box, where he was forced to stand, spiked with the sharpest nails on all sides so that he could not lean in any direction without being pierced,"[10] or from Polybius' account of Nabis of Sparta's deadly statue of his wife, the Iron Apega (earliest form of the device).

[13] This copy was auctioned in the early 1960s and is now on display at the Medieval Crime Museum, Rothenburg ob der Tauber.