The Iron Maiden was a fabricated nineteenth-century entertainment

Evidence

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- A Life in…, 792

Categorization

• QUESTION: Which Nuremberg antiquarian, and when exactly? Worth verifying the primary source if cited in fictional work.
• XREF: Echoes the reader’s work on fabricated or myth-laden objects like poison caltrops and false artifacts. — connects to: The nineteenth century’s phantasmagorias made it a mythical epoch — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 840
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 792