No medieval record
The iron maiden is widely thought of as medieval, but historians have found no mention of one before the 19th century. The historian Klaus Graf has called it “a fiction of the 19th century”.
An invented history
Some historians argue that the writer Johann Philipp Siebenkees (1759–1796) made up an early history for the device. Objects shown as iron maidens may have been pieced together from other artefacts for exhibition.
A Chicago connection
The best-known example, in Nuremberg, was lost in the bombing of the city in 1945. A copy was shown in Chicago at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and is now in the Medieval Crime Museum in Rothenburg ob der Tauber.
