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

There is much to admire about this book. First, and most obviously, it reconstructs a not-so-ordinary life and firmly anchors it in “the turbulent sixteenth century.” Joel Harrington, however, has not only located the life of Meister Frantz, the “faithful executioner” of his title, in the context of his times; he also offers a fascinating (if sometimes grisly and horrifying) look at the “job” of city executioner. That Meister Frantz emerges from these pages as a three-dimensional figure and not merely as a type or a monster is due to Harrington’s tight control of the historian’s craft but also to his ability to write elegant and lively prose.

Of course, Harrington hardly counts as the first historian who has successfully recaptured lives from those famous “worlds we have lost.” Nor can he be counted among the trailblazers of microhistory. Over the years since Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms moved people “on the margins” to the center of historical research, the field has burgeoned and been populated by greyhound saints, bulls in pits, self-fashioned husbands, and the like to the extent that one might wonder if microhistory, or microbiography, has become a shop-worn historical pursuit. One may be excused for asking: What distinguishes this history from so many others? It was not principally the discovery of an unknown or highly unusual source buried in the archives or snuggled into an omnibus miscellany and fortuitously brought to light by flip-through serendipity. Indeed, executioners’ memoirs are, as Harrington points out, not all that unusual and “[b]y the beginning of the modern era … [they] had become a popular genre” [xvii]. Meister Frantz himself by no means languished in obscurity. Several manuscript copies of his journal exist; it was printed in 1801 and 1913 and even translated into English. By itself, however, the journal offered little in the way of personal reflection or introspection and thus, the author feared that his “project … [might have been] doomed from the start” (xviii). Fortunately, it was not and two critical archival finds made the difference: “an older and more accurate manuscript copy of the journal itself than any previously used” (xviii) and, far more valuable for the book that the Faithful Executioner eventually became, another treasure tucked away in the Austrian State Archives: a thirteen-page document addressed to the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II. In the latter, the now-retired Frantz petitioned his overlord to restore his family’s honor by removing him and his family from the ranks of “dishonorable people” (die unehrliche Leute) that included, besides executioners, knackers (which Frantz was not), shepherds, millers, barbers, grave-diggers, and “traveling folk,” that is, those lacking a permanent residence. This dishonor was polluting and heritable, although many of these occupations were essential to the functioning of an early modern community.¹ Frantz clearly suffered psychologically under the burden of dishonor and thus, late in life, launched his attempt (eventually successful) to have it lifted. That lifelong quest, according to Harrington, shaped his self-identify. Read in this way a seemingly “impersonal, unrevealing” journal becomes in “its very composition a testament to the author’s unwavering lifelong campaign for respectability,” (xxii) a crusade that endowed a difficult, unchosen life with meaning. By painstakingly linking phrases and comments scattered throughout the journal, Harrington pieces together an argument showing that, throughout his life, Frantz “held to his fundamental principle of self-determination” (179).

The smooth combination of archival acumen, perceptive close (re-)readings of a long-familiar source, and a large pinch of historical imagination have created an unusual and unusually compelling history, one that probes the psychology of a single individual and equally illuminates the larger forces that contoured his world. What makes this a history instead of merely a story (even a captivating one) is the author’s ability to...