The Faithful Executioner
Life and Death, Honour and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century
Ratings3
Average rating3.7
15
Life and Death, Honour and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century
Ratings3
Average rating3.7
"The extraordinary story of a Renaissance-era executioner and his world, based on a rare and overlooked journal In the late 1500s a Nuremberg man named Frantz Schmidt began to do something utterly remarkable for his era: he started keeping a journal. But what makes Schmidt even more compelling to us is his day job. For forty-five years, Schmidt was an efficient and prolific public executioner, employed by the state to extract confessions and put convicted criminals to death. In his years of service, he executed 361 people and tortured, flogged, or disfigured hundreds more. Is it possible that a man who practiced such cruelty could also be insightful, compassionate, humane--even progressive? In his groundbreaking book, the historian Joel F. Harrington looks for the answer in Schmidt's journal, whose immense significance has been ignored until now. Harrington uncovers details of Schmidt's medical practice, his marriage to a woman ten years older than him, his efforts at penal reform, his almost touching obsession with social status, and most of all his conflicted relationship with his own craft and the growing sense that it could not be squared with his faith. A biography of an ordinary man struggling for his soul, The Faithful Executioner is also an unparalleled portrait of Europe on the cusp of modernity, yet riven by conflict and encumbered by paranoia, superstition, and abuses of power. In his intimate portrait of a Nuremberg executioner, Harrington also sheds light on our own fraught historical moment"--
"A work of nonfiction that explores the thoughts and experiences of one early modern executioner, Nuremberg's Frantz Schmidt (1555-1634), through his own words - a rare personal journal, in which he recorded and described all the executions and corporal punishments he administered between 1573 and his retirement in 1617"--
Reviews with the most likes.
This is the fascinating story of Frantz Schmidt, the executioner of Nuremberg, Germany, in the mid- to late 1500's and early 1600's. His father was forced into the profession by chance, and Schmidt spent his 50 year career trying to restore the social acceptability of his family so that his children would not have to follow him into the same profession.
The book makes use of a sort of diary that Schmidt kept, a record of the people he executed or punished, and what crimes they were convicted of that warranted the punishment. As a young man in his 20's, the records he kept were taciturn–just the name, the offense (such as ‘thief'), and the punishment. As he aged, though, his descriptions began to have more narrative. Joel Harrington, the book's author, uses these narratives, along with other available documents like town records, to piece together a picture of what law enforcement was like in Nuremberg and what Schmidt's attitude to his work was.
Harrington's argument is that although Western societies in the 21st century no longer have public executioners, we are not as removed from 16th century Nuremberg as we like to think. We still struggle with fears of violence and other kinds of lawlessness and frustration with the inability of law enforcement to completely protect us. Our customs have changed, we have access to better investigative tools and more humane punishments, but at bottom we are still in the same predicament that the city fathers of Nuremberg and their executioner were.
I mostly read this book on my lunch breaks at work, believe it or not. It was gruesome, but in a matter of fact way that I didn't find hard to take. It also has a lot of humor and is quite readable.
I just didn't like it. The subject matter and primary source material should have made it right up my alley, but the book did not engage me at all. Could have been a case of the wrong book at the wrong time, so I would encourage anyone who is interested in it and has access to a library copy to go for it.
