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LISA SILVERMAN "Pour savoir la verite de sa bouche": The Practice and Abolition of Judicial Torture in the Parlement of Toulouse, 1600-1788 Dissertation Director: Rudolph Bell The dissertation studies the theory, practice and abolition of judicial torture in France from 1600 to 1788, the year in which it was formally abolished. The argument, in essence, is this: that torture was a meaningful cultural practice as well as a functional legal practice. As such, it rested upon a consensus concerning the nature of pain, of the body and of truth. As that consensus broke down, as the definitions of these three terms shifted and eroded over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so too did the epistemological foundation of torture shift and erode, until, by the late eighteenth century, it had come to be a culturally indefensible practice. Derived from French judicial records of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the dissertation examines legal texts as documents of cultural history, which thus serve as a means of understanding the experience of embodiment in those centuries. The sources include criminal dossiers, interrogations, and sentences, as well as a variety of printed primary sources including legal manuals, medical texts, and philosophical tracts. The study therefore has implications for the study of legal institutions as cultural institutions. Early chapters examine the theory of torture as articulated in legal manuals; and explore the epistemological foundations of torture, examining seventeenth- and eighteenth-century understandings of the body, truth and pain. The third chapter is a statistical examination of sentences to torture which tracks changes in its use. Verbatim interrogations provide the material for the fourth chapter, which finds important differences between the theory and the practice of torture. The final chapter is devoted to representations of torture which redefined the terms of torture and eroded its epistemological foundation. |
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Rutgers
Newark History
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Rutgers
History Department 111
Van Dyck Hall |
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