Joel Harrington's The Executioner's Journal: Meister Frantz Schmidt of the Imperial City of Nuremberg reproduces a captivating document: a record of punishments kept over the course of the career of an early modern executioner. Frantz Schmidt, appointed executioner of Nuremberg in 1578, executed nearly four hundred transgressors and corporally punished hundreds more over the course of a career that spanned four decades. Elements of Harrington's own work—monographs like The Faithful Executioner (his 2013 biography of Schmidt) or The Unwanted Child (his 2009 study of early modern orphans and child abandonment)—has been inspired by Schmidt's journal, which demonstrates its high value as source material.

The Executioner's Journal opens with an extended essay that introduces readers to the set of circumstances that had brought Schmidt to his profession and to the city of Nuremberg. It describes the compensation structure that he was able to negotiate with the city's elders, as well as the logic underlying Schmidt's decision to maintain the journal—an accounting of his work that would later be used in a petition to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II humbly requesting that his family's name be rendered honorable once again. Harrington skillfully weaves information about Schmidt's family (he was married and fathered seven children), his professional training as an apprentice to his father, and his work as a journeyman, into other important contextual frameworks: early modern legal structures, disease patterns, and geopolitical events. Readers learn about the responsibilities and rights of executioners, how they went about their daily tasks, as well as the social structure the relied upon their expertise—but that also relentlessly excluded them as dishonorable people. Harrington explains the various methods of execution and punishment, and he also reminds readers that the executioner had to demonstrate his skill with every job. On those few occasions, for instance, that Schmidt required more than a single stroke to carry out a beheading, he dutifully noted the lapse in his journal. The job, Harrington points out, was a tremendously physical one that took its toll on the body of the executioner. In fact, Frantz Schmidt had to retire after forty years of service because he could no longer perform his duties because of illness.

The text of Schmidt's journal, which Harrington compiled from two existing seventeenth-century manuscript versions and a third dating from the eighteenth century, has appeared previously (in twentieth-century German editions, as well as in an English translation from 1928). This new edition, which is based most heavily on a 1634 manuscript of the journal located in the Nuremberg city archives (the original is missing), was produced in the year of Schmidt's death. Harrington's new translation reaggregates Schmidt's executions and corporal punishments (the two were split in earlier versions) to give readers a sense of the pacing and sequence of punishments as they unfolded over the course of a calendar year. It also offers a lively and readable rendering of Schmidt's text, including the coarse and colorful pseudonyms by which various criminals were locally known, as well as Schmidt's sketches of the various crimes (often studded with fascinating detail and narrative emplotments), as well as the punishments he doled out. One example provides some sense of this: on November 6, 1595, Schmidt relayed the case of farmhand Hans Sigert, who had murdered a tailor with a “three corner fence post.” Schmidt reports that Sigert was “executed here at Nuremberg with the sword. Wept all the way until he knelt down” (59) at the Raven Stone, Nuremberg's execution site. We learn much from these small snippets: the types of crime; the emotional states of the criminals as they faced punishment; the methods of execution and the ways Schmidt tailored them to render the criminal honorable or dishonorable after death; the variety of executions—burning, drowning, breaking, and beheading (whether sitting, kneeling, or, most difficult for Schmidt, standing). We also learn about those who were clipped, branded, blinded, disfigured, or, most frequently, simply exiled by being flogged out of town with rods.

The book concludes with a valuable afterword that provides an analysis of Schmidt's authorial motives and voice. Describing the journal as an ego-document, Harrington discusses topics ranging from Schmidt's memory to his understanding of time and chronology. The afterword also broaches the issue of genre, positioning the journal alongside other types of crime writing from the time. In addition to the journal and the analytical sections, the book includes a series of fascinating images of Schmidt at work and of the results of his efforts, as well as useful maps of Nuremberg and the wider region. These aspects—not to mention Harrington's new translation—make the book one that could serve undergraduate and graduate audiences alike. One can easily imagine The Executioner's Journal being assigned as source material for class research projects or mined for illustrations that could be included in lectures on a wide range of topics. A multitude of research questions and topics appear on nearly every page, in fact, and it is thus easy to imagine how the book might generate new research and fresh questions that could be posed about other sources: How did gender affect punishment? Were sexual crimes punished differently from other types? To what degree did kinship and criminal relationships overlap? Historians are not the only ones likely to find Schmidt's journal fascinating: scholars working in literary criticism, cultural studies, criminology, women's and gender studies, as well as anthropology and sociology will find the source material compelling and Harrington's learned framework a rewarding guide to the legal, social, and cultural issues at hand.

The Executioner's Journal is a riveting read, in short, one that introduces readers to the unfamiliar world of early modern crime and punishment. The people we meet in the course of the journal, Schmidt's depictions of their actions (and sometimes their motivations), and the logic of their punishments bring us a richly detailed view of life in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany.