THE ARTICLE · 5 MIN
The iron maiden — a spiked cabinet that closed on its victim — is one of the most famous “medieval torture devices”. The museums that own iron maidens now say it was nothing of the kind. Here is what they say, where the story came from, and the real punishment it grew out of.
The museums’ verdict
Myth The Medieval Crime Museum in Rothenburg ob der Tauber holds one of the best-known iron maidens (the historian Klaus Graf called it the most famous). The museum describes it like this (our translations from the German):
- “Der metallbeschlagene Holzmantel der Eisernen Jungfrau stammt aus dem 15./16. Jahrhundert.” — The iron maiden’s metal-clad wooden cloak dates from the 15th/16th century.
- “Die metallenen Dornen hingegen sind auf die Zeit der Befreiungskriege (1813-1815) zu datieren.” — The metal spikes, by contrast, date to the Wars of Liberation (1813–1815). The museum says they are French socket bayonets, added later.
- “Die Eiserne Jungfrau diente als Schandmantel für Frauen.” — It served as a cloak of shame for women, who were released after a while “körperlich unversehrt”: physically unharmed.
So the object itself may be old; what is invented is the spiked killing machine.
A second museum is blunter. Schloss Kyburg in Switzerland, where an iron maiden arrived in 1876, calls it “längst als Fälschung durchschaut” — long since exposed as a fake — and in 2026 is running an exhibition on how it went “von der Legende zum «realen» Objekt”: from legend to a “real” object.
The historian Klaus Graf, summarising the specialist study by Wolfgang Schild, put it simply in a 2001 lecture: the execution tool “iron maiden” is “eine fiktion des 19. jahrhunderts” — a fiction of the 19th century. He explains that only in the first half of the 19th century were early-modern shame cloaks — which served as instruments of punishment and torture, and were sometimes called “maidens” — fitted inside with iron spikes, adapting the objects to the gruesome fantasies of literature and legend.
Where the story came from
In 1793 the Altdorf law professor Johann Christian Siebenkees printed a short note in his Materialien zur Nürnbergischen Geschichte, headed only “Aus einer Chronik” (from a chronicle). It says that in 1533 an iron maiden was set up in Nuremberg at the wall of the Fröschturm: an iron figure seven feet high (“7 Schuh hoch”) that spread its arms toward the condemned and, when the executioner touched a step, hacked him into small pieces with broad sabres, which fish in hidden waters then swallowed. Graf calls it an alleged (“angebliche”) chronicle note, and Siebenkees did not name the chronicle. The volume’s title page is dated 1792, which may be why that year is sometimes given; the note appears in its twelfth part, which reports an event of 24 April 1793. Later accounts add a coin forger executed with the device on 14 August 1515; that detail is not in the passage Siebenkees printed.
True Siebenkees doubted the story in the same breath. After remarking that such secret courts had once existed in several towns (“Solche heimliche Gerichte waren ehehin in mehrern Städten”), he wrote: “Ob von dem hier beschriebenen noch eine Spur vorhanden ist, weiß ich nicht, habe auch nie gelesen, daß davon ein Gebrauch gemacht worden. Sollte vielleicht die ganze Sache eine Legende seyn?” — Whether any trace of what is described here still exists I do not know, and I have never read that any use was made of it. Might the whole thing perhaps be a legend? (our translation)
How a legend became an exhibit
In the 19th century, spiked “iron maidens” went on show: Schloss Kyburg’s arrived there in 1876. The San Diego Museum of Man says its own copy “was made in 1828 as decoration for the “Gothic Hall” of a patrician palace in Milan”. The legend also reached fiction: Bram Stoker’s short story “The Squaw” is set in Nuremberg’s torture tower, where “the engine known as the Iron Virgin” stands “near the centre of the room”.
What happened to the Nuremberg iron maiden is confused. One museum account says the original was destroyed in the Allied bombing of Nuremberg in 1944; other accounts give 1945, the year Nuremberg’s castle torture museum closed; and Graf wrote that the most famous one, once in Nuremberg, is now shown in Rothenburg. More than one object has carried the Nuremberg name (the San Diego museum describes its own as a copy made in 1828 for a palace in Milan), so these accounts may describe different objects. We could not settle which.
The real punishment behind it
True Cloaks of shame existed, and museums hold them.
- Schwäbisch Gmünd, about 1680 (Landesmuseum Württemberg): a painted wooden and iron Schandmantel. The museum explains that the convicted person “sollte also weniger körperlich gezüchtigt, sondern öffentlich auf dem Marktplatz bloßgestellt werden” — the aim was less to punish physically than to expose them publicly in the market square.
- Groß Salze (today Bad Salzelmen), 1742 (Salzlandmuseum): a cloak made of barrel staves, used, the museum says, “für Vergehen wie z. B. Beleidigungen oder kleinere Diebstähle” — for offences such as insults or petty theft. The convicted person stood in it for some hours in front of the town hall or was led through the streets. The museum says only 14 other examples survive in other German museums.
These were humiliating and uncomfortable, and meant to be. But they were public shaming, not execution — and the dated examples come from the late medieval and early modern periods, not only the Middle Ages.
Our reading
The iron maiden shows how a myth can make its own evidence. A story printed in the 1790s needed an object; the 19th century built one by adding blades to a real punishment; and the object then seemed to prove the story. The museums that hold these objects are the ones now telling visitors so.
Sources
- Johann Christian Siebenkees (ed.), Materialien zur Nürnbergischen Geschichte, vol. 2 (Nuremberg, 1792; twelfth part), “IX. Miscellaneen”, no. 1, p. 753; Bayerische Staatsbibliothek copy, Internet Archive.
- Mittelalterliches Kriminalmuseum Rothenburg ob der Tauber, “Eiserne Jungfrau – Wahrheit oder Fiktion?” (4 November 2019).
- Museum Schloss Kyburg, exhibition “Eiserne Jungfrau «Fantasiemaschine»” (2026).
- Klaus Graf, “Mordgeschichten und Hexenerinnerungen – das boshafte Gedächtnis auf dem Dorf”, lecture, Freilichtmuseum Neuhausen ob Eck (21 June 2001), archived copy; summarising Wolfgang Schild, Die Eiserne Jungfrau. Dichtung und Wahrheit.
- San Diego Museum of Man, “Medieval Imposter: the Iron Maiden” (archived 2015).
- Landesmuseum Württemberg, Schandmantel, inv. WLM 5383, via museum-digital.
- Salzlandmuseum, Schandmantel, inv. V F4/10, via museum-digital.
- Bram Stoker, “The Squaw”, in Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories (1914).
Checked September 2026.
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- history
- myths
- middle ages
- museums