Torture and Translation in the Multilingual Courtrooms of Early Modern France

Abstract

AbstractThis article sketches the history of the mediation of linguistic difference in the context of judicial torture in early modern France. It argues that language represented an important dimension of what took place in the torture chambers of early modern Europe. Embedded within multilingual societies and habitually confronted with linguistic difference, tribunals developed an array of mediation practices. Shaped by officials’ scribal and linguistic practices and their infliction of pain in order to establish judicial facts, their linguistic choices also shed light on how jurists conceived of and set out uncovering the truth.