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Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2013

It seems that sixteenth century Nuremberg is not so different from other societies down to the present day given our mutual fascination with tales of true crime and punishment. Witness the plethora of television series set in prisons, cop shows, murder mysteries, and true crime accounts. Such is the inescapable conclusion after reading Joel Harrington's The Faithful Executioner.

Frantz Schmidt executed 394 men and women, flogged and disfigured untold hundreds more, and, remarkably, he kept a diary! His career began at age 19 and spanned 45 years, ending with his retirement in 1618. Schmidt's "chronicle of a professional life" reports all the executions and all the corporal punishments he administered: "floggings, brandings, and the chopping of fingers, ears, and tongues" along with the names, professions, hometowns, crimes, and locations where the punishments were administered. Even more remarkable to us, Schmidt "moonlighted" as a healer, a medical consultant, and practitioner. He occasionally had to restore a prisoner to health so that an execution could be effected. Maybe it was not so remarkable in his day for no one had a more intimate knowledge of injuries and wounds to the body, and that knowledge was the first step in alleviating pain and suffering.

Training at the hand of and inheriting the career from his father, Frantz did not face the same level of social exclusion executioners had endured in his father's day.

Nevertheless, though he would have been solidly middle class, he still was not of that class. He worked through what historians have termed the "golden age of executioners"; however, he would not have had access to university or the ministry. There were even limits to church attendance by him and his family, and most careers were closed to his sons. At the end of his career, he described "the great misfortune [that] forced the office of executioner on my innocent father as well as myself, since as much as I would have liked, I couldn't escape it."

At the end of his career, Schmidt applied for and had "his honorable status among other reputable people declared and restored." In the final 16 years of his life, Schmidt worked as a healer, and although life was still not easy for him and his family, he was finally able to be buried in honorable ground. His tombstone, still legible, reads: "Honorable Frantz Schmidt, Physician, in Obere Wöhrd."

Harrington, a professor of history at Vanderbilt University, has skillfully woven meticulous research in German archives and the various printed versions of Schmidt's diary with a brisk and entertaining writing style that captures and sustains the reader's attention. His ability to reveal the life of an executioner and place it dependably within the context of late sixteenth/early seventeenth century Germany makes this one of the very best histories of the year. It exemplifies the best of personal and social history in his treatment of the man, his family, and the age.



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