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    The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century
    The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century
    The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century

    Written by Joel F. Harrington

    Narrated by Jame Gillies

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Based on the rare and until now overlooked journal of a Renaissance-era executioner, the noted historian Joel F. Harrington's The Faithful Executioner takes us deep inside the alien world and thinking of Meister Frantz Schmidt of Nuremberg, who, during 45 years as a professional executioner, personally put to death 394 individuals and tortured, flogged, or disfigured many hundreds more.

    But the picture that emerges of Schmidt from his personal papers is not that of a monster. Could a man who routinely practiced such cruelty also be insightful, compassionate - even progressive?

    In The Faithful Executioner, Harrington vividly re-creates a life filled with stark contrasts, from the young apprentice's rigorous training under his executioner father to the adult Meister Frantz's juggling of familial duties with his work in the torture chamber and at the scaffold.

    With him we encounter brutal highwaymen, charming swindlers, and tragic unwed mothers accused of infanticide, as well as patrician senators, godly chaplains, and corrupt prison guards. Harrington teases out the hidden meanings and drama of Schmidt's journal, uncovering a touching tale of inherited shame and attempted redemption for the social pariah and his children.

    The Faithful Executioner offers not just the compelling firsthand perspective of a professional torturer and killer, but testimony of one man's lifelong struggle to reconcile his bloody craft with his deep religious faith.

    The biography of an ordinary man struggling for his soul, this groundbreaking book also offers an unparalleled panoramic view of Europe on the cusp of modernity, a society riven by violent conflict at all levels and encumbered by paranoia, superstition, and abuses of power.

    Thanks to an extraordinary historical source and its gifted interpreter, we recognize far more of ourselves than we might have expected in this intimate portrait of a professional killer from a faraway world.

    An Author's Republic audio production.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNovel Audio
    Release dateOct 24, 2017
    ISBN9781518969003
    Author

    Joel F. Harrington

    Joel F. Harrington is a professor of history at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of The Unwanted Child, Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany, and A Cloud of Witnesses.

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    Reviews for The Faithful Executioner

    4.5/5

    77 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This relatively short book not only shows that even the hangman can have a good purpose, but that they generally don't want to kill people either. This is highly useful to remember when we think that prisons and human rights make us better than people who lived in that time.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      An Interesting re-creation of the life and times of a Nuremberg executioner in the high Middle Ages based on diary attributed to Meister Franz Schmidt and first published in Germany in 1913.

      The work turns out to be a unexpected entertaining, nuanced, balanced & unsentimental study on human nature in general and the way crime and punishment were seen and handled in medieval society in particular.

      The narration was ironic and slightly humorous, an appropriate balance to a possible macabre presentation.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      An enjoyable, well-written, historical account of a 16th century German executioner. What could have been a boring retelling of a execution ledger turns out to be an interesting coherent story with context included.