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The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century, by Joel F. Harrington
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Based on the rare and until now overlooked journal of a Renaissance-era executioner, the noted historian Joel F. Harrington's The Faithful Executioner takes us deep inside the alien world and thinking of Meister Frantz Schmidt of Nuremberg, who, during forty-five years as a professional executioner, personally put to death 394 individuals and tortured, flogged, or disfigured many hundreds more. But the picture that emerges of Schmidt from his personal papers is not that of a monster. Could a man who routinely practiced such cruelty also be insightful, compassionate—even progressive?
In The Faithful Executioner, Harrington vividly re-creates a life filled with stark contrasts, from the young apprentice's rigorous training under his executioner father to the adult Meister Frantz's juggling of familial duties with his work in the torture chamber and at the scaffold. With him we encounter brutal highwaymen, charming swindlers, and tragic unwed mothers accused of infanticide, as well as patrician senators, godly chaplains, and corrupt prison guards. Harrington teases out the hidden meanings and drama of Schmidt's journal, uncovering a touching tale of inherited shame and attempted redemption for the social pariah and his children. The Faithful Executioner offers not just the compelling firsthand perspective of a professional torturer and killer, but testimony of one man's lifelong struggle to reconcile his bloody craft with his deep religious faith.
The biography of an ordinary man struggling for his soul, this groundbreaking book also offers an unparalleled panoramic view of Europe on the cusp of modernity, a society riven by violent conflict at all levels and encumbered by paranoia, superstition, and abuses of power. Thanks to an extraordinary historical source and its gifted interpreter, we recognize far more of ourselves than we might have expected in this intimate portrait of a professional killer from a faraway world.
- Sales Rank: #259873 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-03-19
- Released on: 2013-03-19
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Booklist
Based on the journal of Frantz Schmidt, a Nuremburg executioner who died in the early seventeenth century, this endlessly fascinating book explores not just the life of a professional killer but also the times in which he lived. An executioner was not a thug with an axe; he was a highly skilled professional, trained in the arts of torture and interrogation and expert in dispensing death in a frightening variety of ways. Although executioners filled a vital societal need, they were considered outcasts (even though many of them were successful medical practitioners on the side). Schmidt executed more than 300 people, but, as Harrington reveals here, he was a good, ambitious man who dreamed of returning his family to the social status they enjoyed before Schmidt’s father became an executioner. A sort of real-life companion to Oliver Pötzsch’s 2010 novel The Hangman’s Daughter (which, like its sequels, is set in Germany in the mid-seventeeth century), the book opens a window on a profession and a period in history about which there are few primary sources. --David Pitt
Review
“Fascinating . . . Engrossing . . . Harrington brings out the sheer strangeness of the past . . . In The Faithful Executioner, Mr. Harrington has not only rescued the life of an individual from disgust and condescension but also, by focusing on a career in killing, brought a whole world back to life.” ―The Wall Street Journal
“Remarkable . . . [A] fascinating exploration . . . this is a surprisingly modern, even topical story that poses difficult questions about capital punishment and what Harrington calls ‘the human drive toward retribution.'” ―The Washington Post
“Fascinating . . . One of the pleasures of reading history is to be transported somewhere, even if we aren't sure we want to go.” ―The Chronicle of Higher Education
“Equal parts enlightening and enjoyable.” ―The Daily Beast
“[A] vividly drawn portrait . . . Harrington succeeds in deftly taking us beyond Schmidt's biography to address broader questions. Finely researched and crafted.” ―History Today
“A fascinating read.” ―Publishers Weekly
“Surprisingly poignant . . . A whole teeming world of Reformation Germany comes alive.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“This is a precious story that Harrington has drawn from the journal and archival records, a braiding of Schmidt's words with a re-creation of Schmidt's world, a story that is at once inclusive and atmospheric, deeply intimate and rare . . . It is a wonder-making world, made manifest by an artful historian's hand.” ―Barnes & Noble Review
“Who can imagine how an executioner feels about his trade? Joel F. Harrington has written a considered and fascinating book that helps us hear the voice of one such man, a professional torturer (and healer) who, astonishingly, kept a diary. Exploring both sixteenth-century Nuremberg and the world about the city, he re-creates the social context for the flamboyant displays of cruelty that later centuries find so hard to comprehend. Both the executioner and his victims are rescued from our condescension and restored to their own moral universe―which is not as far from ours as we like to suppose.” ―Hilary Mantel, Man Booker Prize–winning author Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies
“A book as entertaining and revealing as it is improbable and outrageous. Joel F. Harrington has told a marvelous yarn, giving us not just the compelling biography of Meister Frantz but his world.” ―Rick Atkinson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944
“In an astonishing feat of historical reconstruction, Joel F. Harrington uniquely draws us into the emotional world of a man paid to kill professionally--into his troubled sense of achievement and shame. This compelling book is brilliant reading for everyone interested in new ways of thinking about the past as well as crime and punishment today.” ―Ulinka Rublack, author of Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe
“The Faithful Executioner masterfully conjures the heavy stench and bustle of a sixteenth-century southern German city--waterlogged roads, smoky marketplaces, blood-lusty masses laden with bizarre superstitions--via the Lebenslauf of a curious figure: Meister Frantz Schmidt, Nuremburg's state executioner from 1578 to 1617. With the help of Schmidt's private journal, Joel F. Harrington revivifies both the detailed and the abstract with enviable scholarship and style. This is social history at its very best: weird, riveting, addictive.” ―R. Jay Magill Jr., author of Sincerity
“The Faithful Executioner is much more than a description of the many imaginative and horrifying means of torturing and putting prisoners to death. It is a rare and utterly fascinating examination of the society that demands it.” ―New York Journal of Books
About the Author
Joel F. Harrington is a professor of history at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of The Unwanted Child, Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany, and A Cloud of Witnesses.
Most helpful customer reviews
28 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
Like stepping back into another, darker, time. Excellent book.
By D. Graves
Some books are engrossing: you don't want to stop reading. This is as engrossing a book as you'll ever read - and it's non-fiction.
Think of it: the diary of an executioner of the late 1500s to early 1600s - a time when thousands were brutally tortured and put to death by barbaric means - has been preserved. Further, the man and his journal entries are then made the centerpiece of a detailed and captivating social history of the time and place in which he carried out his 361 executions, a history entirely different than what the common reader might expect. This is, in fact, what this excellent book is all about. As a lover of history, I cannot recommend this volume highly enough; it is like stepping back into another, darker, time.
The story of Meister Frantz Schmidt (b. 1555, d. 1634), executioner of Nuremberg from 1578 to 1617 (after a bloody "apprenticeship" in Bamberg from 1573 to 1578) is one you will not soon forget. It is not a story for the squeamish. However, the author does not serve horror for horror's sake: the times were, in fact, horrific. Executions were carried out by garoting (rope), sword, breaking wheel (for the most violent of criminals), burning (for those considered worse than violent criminals: counterfeiters and homosexuals), and drowning. Schmidt made diary entries for each of his 361 executions, the latter ones more detailed than the earlier, as well as for the 345 "light" punishments of cutting off an ear or finger, or flogging. However, these violent events only punctuate the social history of Schmidt's life and times; not only the crimes and criminals which kept the executioner steadily employed (and, in fact, fairly wealthy) but the societal structure of crime and punishment and of the executioner's place in that society.
Frantz Schmidt was a truly fascinating man who, after retirement as executioner, became a man of medicine, and who, upon his death, was given a state funeral. His diaries have been published since 1801. However, it is the expertise of a historian, the author, which gives us such an engrossing, well-rounded picture of the man and his times. One of the best books on history I have ever read.
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
Killing and Torturing for 16th Century Justice
By Rob Hardy
The death penalty, the punishment of legally killing someone guilty of a crime, is controversial now. More than half the nations of the world do not allow it, and the number of US states banning it has increased to eighteen. It was taken for granted centuries ago that you could be hanged for theft, and also that you might have your ears cropped or fingers cut off for other crimes, or that torturing people was in the legal interest of governments. Governments would pay executioners to carry out this handiwork, so there were lots of executioners who were government employees within cities and states. Meister Frantz Schmidt of Nuremberg was just one of these functionaries, working from 1573 to 1618, but he was different: he kept a journal. That journal is the basis for _The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century_ (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by historian Joel F. Harrington. The journal is sparse. There are a few pages in this book that have lengthy quotations from it, with most quotations being a few sentences regarding a particular miscreant or the administration of a particular punishment. It seems, however, that Harrington has dug deep into the archives of the times, and fills out Schmidt's ambitious life story, along with giving insight to his time's views of crime, punishment, and the social role of the executioner.
Schmidt got his life vocation as executioner from his father, who had been unwillingly forced into the job. His father would have trained him in decapitation by the sword, and hanging. Just as important was learning how to apply instruments of torture. Sometimes these would be applied to torment someone on the way to the gallows; a court might prescribe that a certain number of nips with red-hot tongs, pulling off flesh, were needed before death happened. Torture was used also to get information; we might now call it by the euphemism "enhanced interrogation," but no euphemisms were needed in Schmidt's time. Along with thumb screws, flame to the armpits, the rack, and others, he would also have legally used the torture called "water," known these days as waterboarding, and some of our contemporaries still think this a dandy technique. Schmidt would have been responsible for patching up those that he had tortured, perhaps just to make them presentable on execution day. He would have used salves and herbs, and he would have known how to set bones broken by his more violent techniques. He didn't make any extra money for helping to heal prisoners in this way, but he would have had extensive hands-on insight into human anatomy. Because of this experience, Schmidt, like many other executioners, was in demand as a healer, not for prisoners but for the general public. Not only did he make more money as a practical doctor than he did for his civic work, he treated thousands of patients and was well respected in this role. He worked all his life to escape the shame of filling the outcast role of executioner (he would have been socially shunned), and after he retired, he was cleared of all inherited shame.
This is an engrossing history. The punishments described are unpleasant to read about, but so are the crimes as committed by highwaymen, burglars, and arsonists, often preying upon countrymen who were far removed from any civic protection and who might thereby lose all their crops, cattle, home, and family. Through Schmidt, Harrington makes real a lawless and brutal world, and readers 400 years later will be thankful that the routines of justice are different now, at least for most of us and for most of the time.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
The Faithful Executioner
By S Riaz
This is the fascinating story of Meister Frantz Schmidt (1555 - 1634) who was an executioner and torturer in Nuremberg and who kept a diary, which the author has fleshed out into an incredible biography of a man and a time which is little known. It was unusual to keep a diary in those times, but Schmidt kept a personal journal of the executions he carried out throughout his long career, from 1573 at the age of just nineteen, to his retirement in 1618.
One of the oddest, and saddest, things about Schmidt's life is that he became an executioner through a quirk of fate when his father, Heinrich, was called upon by a noble to act as executioner after he had arrested three locals for plotting against his life Up to that point, Heinrich had been a woodsman and fowler. After the hapless man was forced to kill he had no choice but to become an executioner. Since the Middle Ages, executioners were shunned and excluded by society and tended to bond together out of necessity. When this terrible social exclusion was forced upon him, Heinrich did the best he could and trained his son Frantz in his new profession - although both men had plans to try to escape the calling forced upon them.
It has to be said that Frantz did the best he could under the circumstances. His training began with using rhubarb stalks to practice on (apparently similar to the sinews in the neck - much of this book is gruesome, so this is not for the squemish), continuing with beheading stray dogs and helping his father in his work before, ahem, striking out on his own. During his long career, he personally killed three hundred and ninety four people, torturing countless others. For this was a time of violence, when the executioner had to administer justice for the community, both to avenge the victims and end the threat posed by dangerous criminals as well as setting an example of what could happen if crimes were committed.
Frantz, in fact, lived in "the golden age of the executioner", when it was decided to prosecute criminals more effectively and full time experts were needed in this reform of criminal justice. Professional executioners were seen as part of this reform. Although many of the crimes discussed in this book seem to be treated harshly, and the stories of torture are often troubling to read, there is also a great deal of compassion and good sense. Although this was a time when superstition was rife and women often accused of witchcraft, the area where Frantz worked seemed to have fairly enlightened views about such things. Often Frantz seems troubled by violence against children (thieves often chopped off babies hands, using them as candles and good luck charms) and also made disparaging comments about prisoners who refused to act in a solemn or repentent way at their executions. Although most prisoners seemed to try to make some kind of religious peace at the end of their life, some refused to cooperate (understandably) and other treated events with levity; one proclaiming that the priests words gave him, "a headache" and apparently dying with a smirk on his face. Other attempts to leave corpses on the gallows as a warning was not treated with the respect those in authority expected - one thief was stripped to his stockings, causing a surge of curious onlookers, including "cheeky females", which caused the executioner to be ordered to make him respectable again.
This is a really interesting read and the author has done a great job of taking a journal with little that is personal and recreating the life of Frantz Schmidt. We hear of his success, his tragedies, the sudden onset of plague in the community, the way crimes were viewed and dealt with and read, with interest, whether he ever managed to escape the fate thrust upon his family and find social acceptance. Highly recommended.
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