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

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 Schmidt' s journal.