Synopses & Reviews
Based on the rare and until now overlooked journal of a Renaissance-era executioner, the noted historian Joel F. Harringtons 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 apprentices rigorous training under his executioner father to the adult Meister Frantzs 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 Schmidts 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 mans 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.
Review
“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, Nuremburgs state executioner from 1578 to 1617. With the help of Schmidts 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: How a Moral Ideal Born Five Hundred Years Ago Inspired Religious Wars, Modern Art, Hipster Chic, and the Curious Notion That We All Have Something to Say (No Matter How Dull)
“A fascinating read.” —Publishers Weekly
“Surprisingly poignant . . . A whole teeming world of Reformation Germany comes alive.” —Kirkus Reviews
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 arent 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 Schmidts 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 Schmidts words with a re-creation of Schmidts 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 historians 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, Nuremburgs state executioner from 1578 to 1617. With the help of Schmidts 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
Review
“A considered and fascinating book.”—Hilary Mantel, author of Bring Up the Bodies and Wolf Hall
“An engrossing study...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
“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
Synopsis
The extraordinary story of a Renaissance-era executioner and his world, based on a rare and overlooked journalIn 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 Schmidts journal, whose immense significance has been ignored until now. Harrington uncovers details of Schmidts 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.
Synopsis
THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF A RENAISSANCE-ERA EXECUTIONER AND HIS WORLD, BASED ON A RARE AND OVERLOOKED JOURNAL.
In a dusty German bookshop, the noted historian Joel F. Harrington stumbled upon a remarkable document: the journal of a sixteenth-century executioner. The journal gave an account of the 394 people Meister Frantz Schmidt executed, and the hundreds more he tortured, flogged, or disfigured for more than forty-five years in the city of Nuremberg. But the portrait of Schmidt that gradually emerged was not that of a monster. Could a man who practiced such cruelty also be insightful, compassionate—even progressive?
In The Faithful Executioner, Harrington teases out the hidden meanings and drama of Schmidts journal. Deemed an official outcast, Meister Frantz sought to prove himself worthy of honor and free his children from the stigma of his profession. Harrington uncovers details of Schmidts life and work: the shocking, but often familiar, crimes of the day; the medical practice that he felt was his true calling; and his lifelong struggle to reconcile his craft with his religious faith.
In this groundbreaking and intimate portrait, Harrington shows us that our thinking about justice and punishment, and our sense of our own humanity, are not so remote from the world of The Faithful Executioner.
About the Author
Joel F. Harrington is a professor of history at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of The Unwanted Child, winner of the 2010 Roland H. Bainton Prize for History, as well as Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany and A Cloud of Witnesses. He lives with his wife and two children in Nashville, Tennessee.