Talk:Oubliette

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Contents 1 Earliest reference 2 Contradictory statements 3 Etymology of the word oubliette 4 merge 5 Pronunciation, please

[edit] Earliest reference

My trusty Bloch & Wartburg (French etymological dictionary) is the source for that earliest reference in French; at which point it becomes irrelevant what Benvenuto Cellini wrote, especially since the Italian word is segreta — oubliette is not in use in Italian — and thus I'm almost certain that oubliette is the word used by the English translator, which also, by the way, means 19c or not much earlier. So, although I'm loath to get rid of a nice story and the mystique of Mr. Cellini, it's not germane to the article. Bill 00:20, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

i dont know, i mean Cellini did speak french quite well.

The oubliette was not merely a place for storage of grain but a real live form of prison cell in the middle ages. If you tour, for example, the French church opposite Notre Dame on the left bank, it not only has an oubliette, the oubliettes were convenient for ejecting people into the adjacent river.

[edit] Contradictory statements

In order we have:

1. An oubliette was a form of dungeon which was accessible only from a hatch in a high ceiling.
2. There is no reason to suspect that this particular place of incarceration was more than a flight of romantic elaboration...
3. Although they may have been used as an inventive place of detention, their original purpose was to store grain.
4. There is an excellent example of an oubliette at the chateau in Meung-sur-Loire ... only one prisoner escaped...

The first and last statements imply that the use of the oubliette for detention is an established fact; the second and third that if they were used at all it was only as a by-product of other uses. They can't all be right; at the very least some consistency needs to br brought into the article. Loganberry (Talk) 18:03, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

Also, I believe the statements "To exit an oubliette was impossible under any circumstances, without outside help" and "Apparently only one prisoner escaped; he wrote a poem for the king who was visiting." are blatantly contradicting, unless of course it can be proved that the escapee had outside help. --RKingdom 23:02, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

These two sentences are not contradicting, but the structure is a bit gauche, the only prisoner who escaped had outside help (after presenting his poem) - the king.

The problem seems that an editor didn't know how to express himself properly. From what I read the obliette was meant for lifetime imprisonment. Therefore it was the equivalent of a maximum-security wing in modern prisons. The problem there is, prisoners will try to escape and the longer they are imprisoned, the more likely. Guarding them with conditions close to normal living standards would have been costly, so this was a cheap and efficient solution. So the question is perhaps how many livetime imprisonments were conducted and thus how frequent was the use of obliettes compared to usual imprisonment? Wandalstouring 16:53, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Possibly, but possibly not meant for "lifetime imprisonment". The article on Chillington Castle [[1]] states: Prisoners of the castle may have had their limbs cut off or broken before being thrown into the pit to die. Eventually the bodies piled up and were cleared out early last century. So we might more consider the oubliette to be a means of execution more than a place of confinement.

As for the "prisoner who escaped", the statement is completely unreferenced and, what is possibly worse, the word "escaped" is not the correct word to use at all; to receive a pardon, or clemency, or to otherwise be released from confinement is far different than to "escape" as "escape" is freeing oneself from confinement when the confining power desires the confinement to continue. So either the word "escape" needs to be changed, or - preferably - the whole reference to this escape needs to be removed unless a citation is added. Hi There 08:10, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

I did a bit of cleanup to this article and tried to eliminate the contradictions. It reads to me that the statement about the grain simply gives the history of the oubliette, i.e. somebody got the bright idea one day to throw prisoners down the grain pit. The bit about "romantic elaboration" is simply stating that the work cited did not refer to a literal oubliette (i.e. a hole in the ground) but simply a poor place to spend time; however it remains notable as the earliest English use of the term. Finally, I removed the bit about the prisoner being freed due to a poem. If someone finds a reference to that, they can add it back in. Generally, this article needs references anyway, which I documented. Ryanjunk 17:38, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Etymology of the word oubliette

Here is a copy of Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, 3 volumes, a reference for French etymology. Below is the entirety of the entry—after reading it, I think that the grain storage thing I added myself may be wrong. Read on (original French text available on request:

“	Oubliette is first attested (1372) in the expression mettre en oubliete (sic) “put to oubliete” in Instruction de la Geole du Chastelet de Paris then under the modern form (14th century. The word, by a trivial derivation (diminutive) and an impromptu semantisation) designate the dungeon where a convict was placed there forever and thus forgotten (oubliée). The word had been reused in the 19th century in archeology refering to a pit of tipping trap door (trappe basculante) allowing to get rid of someone by hurling him/her to the void.	”
—Le Robert — Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, 1998

Perhaps you picked up somewhere that a former grain storage was used as an obliette. Wandalstouring 16:55, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] merge

I suggest to merge oubliette and immurement into one article on medieval high security imprisonment, implying slow death of the captive or something like that. Wandalstouring 21:20, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

"Medieval high security imprisonment" might be difficult to define--would the pillory count, for example? It's public, so it's very different from what we think of as high-security imprisonment today, but that very fact of being in public view makes it higher security than many other methods of imprisonment; everyone in the village becomes part of the watch. However it might be defined, I think it'd be an incredibly long article--those were creative times for law enforcement. Additionally, the oubliette has enough of a unique character and history (more than just the medieval era, in fact) to deserve its own article. This one could be expanded and wikified into sections once there's more info, but I say, keep it. --PoetrixViridis 08:20, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

I agree to keep it separately. They seem to be somewhat distinct in that an oubliette is designed specifically for execution/torture, whereas immurement is done during building construction. See alsos at the bottom of both pages would be appropriate, of course, and those are there.--Kchase T 21:27, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pronunciation, please

For those of us who are not steeped in the ways of L’Académie française, please add pronunciation. This issue seems to be wikidemic to French places and names!

-It's [oo-blee-et]. With the emphasis on 'et'.