The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century by Joel F. Harrington (review)

As Joel Harrington notes in the preface to this intriguing portrait of Frantz Schmidt, executioner in Nuremberg from 1578 to 1618, the story it tells is first that of a man, and second that of the world in which he lived and worked. Both the man and his world evolved in interesting ways during this period, and it is this evolution that frames Harrington’s lively and very readable book.

The story is based primarily on Frantz Schmidt’s diary (first published in 1801), a chronicle-like list of entries describing the many hundreds of executions and public punishments he performed from his first hanging in 1573 until he retired in 1618. Harrington provides immediate context with a variety of local records produced during Schmidt’s lifetime in Hof, Bamberg, and Nuremberg, at the same time locating developments in these towns within the more general framework of early modern German social, political, and legal history. As a result he is able to tell the story of a life on the margins from multiple perspectives, the most interesting of which is Schmidt’s own. To this end, Harrington often lets the “faithful executioner” speak for himself, incorporating many direct quotes from Schmidt’s diary into his narrative.

Shunned as members of a dishonorable caste but enjoying a relatively high economic status, early modern executioners were in the unusual position of living as privileged outcasts. Schmidt’s lifetime coincided with the high point of the instrumentalization of public executions as dramas of contrition and redemption and as demonstrations of government power. This “golden age of the executioner” (26) provided ample opportunity for Schmidt to ply his trade and to leave a colorful record of its grisly details. Harrington organizes Schmidt’s personal story around the stages of his professional career, beginning with his early life as an apprentice to his father and concluding with his late-life struggle to realize his lifelong dream of redeeming the family name and providing himself and his progeny with honorable status as professional healers.

Throughout the book, Harrington attempts to interpret Schmidt’s entries not only as a record of early modern crime and punishment, but also as a chronicle of the executioner’s personal relationship with his job and his condemned victims. This is especially challenging during Schmidt’s early years, when the entries are generally terse and lack detail. As time passes and the executioner matures, his entries become longer and more thoughtful, providing more to work with in teasing out motives and judgments. What Harrington finds in this process is a man who understood and fulfilled his role as a member of a dishonorable caste, but was not satisfied to accept his fate as permanent. In both his personal life and his professional judgments, Schmidt was careful to distinguish between his own dishonorable status and the kinds of disreputable choices made by those he was charged with punishing. Throughout his life, Schmidt also displayed deeply religious values and avoided any hint of scandalous behavior, even eschewing drink (a rare choice for a man during the sixteenth century). Never far from the surface of Schmidt’s pious judgments and exemplary conduct, Harrington concludes, was his “relentless campaign” (184) to restore his family to honor—a battle that was ultimately won, at least in the legal sense.

Recreating a life in all of its details is never easy, and it is in these details that some questions arise, in particular in defining and delineating the different categories of honor and dishonor that characterized life in the early modern German city. While Harrington is convincing in distinguishing Schmidt’s forthright behavior from his legal status as a dishonorable person, these lines are somewhat blurred in describing other actors in Schmidt’s world. It is not clear, for example, why such professions as butchers or tanners are...