Originally Posted by caitlynmariecd
Yes, who would not? The Middle Ages is a big turn-on for me too, and like you I always wanted to be the woman tied up, flogged, violated or threatened with still worse (the threat element is soo effective in movies and novels like Ivanhoe), especially if you're faced with long sentences delivered in latin, a language you don't understand, while the whip is something you understand perfectly well.
I think the witch hunting proper didn't really begin until the mid 15th century, it's more a renaissance-reformation thing, but some of the techniques had been put to use already in hunting down heretics and false prophet movements a couple of hundred years earlier - burning at the stake of course, branding, whipping, thumb screwing and tricking people to get confessions. I remember reading about a woman acccused in the Swedish witch craze of the late 17th century, a vogue which had the peculiarity that children took a very active part in raising the witch hysteria and developing the stories that sent a number of wiomen to the stake.
Anyway, I read about this woman Elin (Helen) who was accused of flying to the Devil on her broom, denied all charges and was whipped and suspended by her hands, the jailer having first tied her wrists tight at her back (I suppose *real* tight, one wrist crossing the other), so that her weight was supported by her twisted wrists only (I once tried simulating this for half a minute in a deserted gym room with a line of rungs fixed at the wall, without tying my hands of course, just stretching back-and-up - the pain is wild!) She was left like that for two days, probably passed out at some point, refused to break but was condemned and hanged anyway and her corpse burnt at the stake. That scene really makes a fave fantasy, I'd want to be hoisted up like that in the dungeon, gagged and with feet bound too and given over to a nasty jail warden.