Medieval Trial By Ordeal – Did It Actually Work?

Throw the suspect into a pool: if he floats, he’s guilty; if he sinks, he’s innocent. Or make the perp hold a red-hot iron, and if God heals the burn in three days, she is blameless. Today such methods of justice are dismissed as ignorant and barbaric, but a U. Chicago professor argues that, by leveraging defendants’ own superstitions, trial by ordeal made it “possible to secure criminal justice where it would have otherwise been impossible to do so.”