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 grad...