The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century
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