Joel Harrington's latest work is a fascinating examination of the life of the executioner Frantz Schmidt, who served as a professional killer for the bustling city of Nuremberg during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This study, which is aimed at a broad popular audience, is based in large part on Schmidt's private journal, which carefully cataloged the 394 executions and thousands of corporal punishments that he carried out over the course of his forty-five-year career as the city's master executioner. Some entries are brief, listing only a few details, whereas others provide much longer accounts of crimes committed and punishments—executions as well as floggings, dismemberings, and brandings—duly meted out. And though this journal lacks the self-analysis and personal details that usually make historical ego documents so interesting to scholars, we can be thankful that Harrington saw here an opportunity to reclaim and dignify an intriguing life story in order to illuminate an understudied aspect of early modern European society and culture.

As a biography, The Faithful Executioner focuses on Schmidt's own life, tracing his background and childhood, his marriage and family, as well as the track of his long and successful career. Yet, Harrington aims not only to tell the story of a man who belonged to a profession of “historical outcasts” (234), but also to recreate Schmidt's “historical world” (xxii). He thus firmly situates Schmidt's story in the context of daily life in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Nuremberg and uses his career as an executioner as a way to analyze early modern concepts and experiences of death, pain, and judicial violence. For example, Harrington carefully describes the last days and moments of the condemned, or the “poor sinners” as they were called, and investigates the social function of executioners such as Schmidt, arguing that “[p]ublic executions, like corporal punishments, were meant to accomplish two goals: first, to shock spectators and, second, to reaffirm divine and temporal authority. A steady and reliable executioner played the pivotal role in achieving this delicate balance through his ritualized and regulated application of violence on the state's behalf” (76).

Harrington notes extensive changes to the judicial system and culture of punishment over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This includes a shift away from such grisly punishments as eye gouging (though removal of fingers and other disfigurements continued), and a decline in some of the more gruesome executions for women common in the earlier sixteenth century (such as being buried alive or drowned). Furthermore, he notes a general decrease in hangings and an increase in beheadings over the course of Schmidt's life, a trend that required cities such as Nuremberg to turn to more reliable and professional executioners, men capable of orchestrating and carrying out complex and difficult public executions by the sword. This shift, Harrington notes, contributed to a rise in the “[p]opular recognition of the skill and professional status of the trained executioner” (74).

Such popular recognition of the executioner's skill and professionalism is important, for in all other ways executioners were, in Harrington's words, “universally reviled as cold-blooded killers for hire and accordingly excluded from respectable society at every turn” (16). Not only were they usually forbidden to live within city walls, but they were also barred from joining a guild, serving as a witness in court, holding public office, or even entering a church, tavern, bathhouse, or other public building. No honorable person wanted to socialize with them or enter their houses, and there was “such a pervasive fear of social contamination at the very touch of an executioner's hand that respectable individuals jeopardized their very livelihoods by even casual contact” (17).

It stands to reason that someone in such a position would find his restricted social status uncomfortable and even infuriating, especially as this status extended as well to his wife and children. Yet, in his journal Schmidt never commented on his own dishonorable standing within the community and seemed, as Harrington himself notes, to accept and even revere established social norms and hierarchies. It was only at the age of seventy, years after his retirement, that Schmidt gave some indication of his frustration, penning a letter to Emperor Ferdinand II in which he successfully requested the restoration of his honor and his family's good name. Although one could argue that Schmidt's appeal to the emperor might have signified a mature reassessment of his life and career, or indicated a growing concern for his now adult sons, Harrington instead reaches the speculative conclusion that this letter proves that Schmidt was driven by an “unwavering lifelong campaign for respectability” (xxii). This “foundational motive” (xxi) is then the lens through which Harrington analyzes and understands both the journal and the entire path of Schmidt's life, including his associations and social relations, his successful side career as a medical practitioner (not unusual for executioners), his unusual sobriety, and so on.

Given the paucity of personal information Schmidt provides in his journal and his letter to the emperor, Harrington is forced to turn to additional archival sources to round out the details. Even so, there is little to go on, especially for Schmidt's early life. To give readers a vibrant sense of the place and time, and to help them understand Schmidt and his world, Harrington thus engages (without warning the reader) in some broad fictionalization. This is especially prevalent in the early part of the book, for Schmidt's journal tells us nothing of his early years growing up in the town of Hof or of his life as an apprentice executioner. Drawing upon other contemporary accounts and modern scholarly studies, Harrington imagines and fancifully reconstructs such scenes as a young Schmidt practicing beheading on a dog: “on this day, as the young Frantz raised his sword over the trembling body of an unlucky stray, that secret shame [of social stigma] burned fresh in his mind” (17); or a mature Schmidt botching an execution by burning: “[p]ungent wafts of vomit and urine mix with the fragrant smoke from grilling sausages and roasting chestnuts” (xiii). Such literary flights of fancy stray from accepted historical method, but are, at the same time, one of the strengths of this interesting work. Not just a dry monograph intended purely for academics, The Faithful Executioner has instead fulfilled the broader mission of its subtitle by painting a rich and colorful portrait of life and death, honor and shame in the turbulent sixteenth century. This book will therefore be accessible to the interested general reader and useful for undergraduate teaching.