The Pit and the Pendulum and you find an appeal to the nerves by tawdry physical affrightments." The Pit and the Pendulum "The Pit and the Pendulum" is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published in 1842 in the literary annual "The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1843". The story is about the torments endured by a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, though Poe skews historical facts. The narrator of the story describes his experience of being tortured. The story is especially effective at inspiring fear in the reader because of its heavy focus on the senses, such
Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition to create civil tribunals to repress religious dissidents, above all Catholics, distancing themselves from the previous practices. Catholic heretics were identified as traitors by a system that was not that much different from the Inquisition. It even went so far as to kidnap an English Catholic lawyer from the Netherlands, John Story, before taking him to England to be tortured, accused of treason and conspiracy and executed. The system by which the government insisted on trying traitors, not heretics, remained in place until the reign of James I which maintained the illusion that the Inquisition was a catholic institution clearly