The instruments of torture that you see in museums are usually nineteenth-century artifacts. If you take, for example, the Iron Maiden, a spiked metal coffin which impales its victim, it appears to have been created as entertainment by a Nuremberg antiquarian who put it on display in a used prison. And copies of this grim fantasy went on tour through Great Britain and America: and Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, put it in a story. And the Iron Maiden has been with us ever since

Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self-…, loc. 792