The medieval torture rack in Mary Schudel's Lincoln Lutheran English class is only a prop.
JODI FUSON/Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Saturday, December 9, 2006 6:00 pm
Chris Akins was a little nervous when he got stopped by a police officer while hauling his medieval English project around town in the back of his truck.
It turned out the police officer wasn’t sure the huge assembly of lumber was tied down tightly enough, and he wanted to know what it was.
After Akins told him that it was a medieval torture rack he had helped construct for an English project at Lincoln Lutheran, the officer told him to be careful and sent him on his way.
Each year to launch her English 4 unit on medieval literature, Lincoln Lutheran teacher Mary Schudel challenges her students to go above and beyond last year’s class when coming up with props for their presentation.
“At the beginning of the unit, I show them samples of projects students have done in the past,” Schudel said.
“It’s just a nice change of pace, and it puts more responsibility on them as learners,” Schudel said.
The group that gets the crime and punishment presentation has one of the best chances to bring medieval times to life by picking a torture method and replicating it. Akins, Alex Deeter, Michelle Dulac, David Synhorst and Jacob Tewes researched many forms of torture for their presentation, but decided to use a rack for their main prop.
“It’s incredibly morbid,” Synhorst admits. “The more we read the more we kind of got disgusted with our topic.”
“I think pretty much the reason we did this is to show our classmates how gruesome it is,” he added. “It definitely made it real for me.”
Over Thanksgiving, Akins, Tewes, Deeter and Synhorst got together at Tewes’ house and built the rack with some spare lumber.
“It’s a simple enough device that we knew we could make it without any definite blueprints,” Tewes said.
“We were thinking how to build it as we did it.”
The rack comprises a bedlike frame, ropes at the top and bottom for tying the hands and feet and a crank system to tighten the ropes that stretch the torture victim. It was one of the most common forms of interrogation used across Europe during medieval times, they said.
There was a bit of trial and error building it, and Akins and Deeter served as test victims a few times each. When it was time to present, the group found there were plenty of class volunteers to try out their creation.
The group is still deciding what to do with the rack, which is sitting in Schudel’s classroom for now. They’ve talked about disassembling it or selling it on ebay, she said.
“And if all that fails, I’ll use it for detention.”
Reach Jodi Fuson at 473-7211 or homeroom@journalstar.com.