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Pishtaco Myth
Early Modern, Long 19th- 20th centuries / August 4, 2024 / art, colonial, folklore, folklore/mythology, mythology
If you look carefully, you will see a corpse dressed in white lying in a coffin in this illustration of the Laws of Hamburg from 1497. This painting shows the Medieval practice of _cruentation_, a type of jurisprudence where someone convicted of murder would put their hands on their alleged victim – the idea was that God would make the victim bleed if the murderer touched the corpse. Cruentation continued to be used as a way of determining guilt until the Middle of the 1700s.