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"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"--
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Previews available in: English
Showing 6 featured editions. View all 6 editions?
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1
The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death in the Sixteenth Century
May 01, 2014, Vintage
paperback
0099572664 9780099572664
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2
The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death in the Sixteenth Century
2013, Bodley Head
hardcover
in English
1847922120 9781847922120
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3
The faithful executioner: life and death, honor and shame in the turbulent sixteenth century
2013, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
in English
0809049929 9780809049929
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4
Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century
2013, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
in English
0809049937 9780809049936
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5
Faithful Executioner: Life and Death in the Sixteenth Century
2013, Penguin Random House
in English
1448129370 9781448129379
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6
The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century
Dec 31, 2013, Picador Paper, Picador
paperback
1250043611 9781250043610
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