Review by Choice Review
Harrington (Vanderbilt), a prize-winning historian, has long exhibited imaginative insight into the personal lives of early modern Germans. This fine book derives from the journal that Nuremberg's long-serving executioner, Franz Schmidt, kept at his father's request between 1573 and 1617. Schmidt listed executions, interrogations, and corporal punishments for over 600 criminals. Although an ego document, his journal primarily addresses criminals and their potential for redemption through ritualized public punishment and execution. Schmidt emerges as a sober professional with sympathy for the victims and a 16th-century male's commitment to honor and social order. Harrington contextualizes Schmidt's journal with documents from Nuremberg and Bamberg's archives. Schmidt's ripening desire to narrate confessed crimes, in part to justify his own violent role in punishing the criminals, allows Harrington to explore the range of criminality and depravity as well as the socially necessary but personally dishonorable role of public executioners. Schmidt wrote his personal testimony to restore his family's honor, as his father had become an executioner under deadly threats from his capricious prince. Schmidt succeeded. Maps, contemporary illustrations of executions (including Schmidt's), endnotes. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Accessible to all readers. P. G. Wallace Hartwick College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Based on the journal of Frantz Schmidt, a Nuremburg executioner who died in the early seventeenth century, this endlessly fascinating book explores not just the life of a professional killer but also the times in which he lived. An executioner was not a thug with an axe; he was a highly skilled professional, trained in the arts of torture and interrogation and expert in dispensing death in a frightening variety of ways. Although executioners filled a vital societal need, they were considered outcasts (even though many of them were successful medical practitioners on the side). Schmidt executed more than 300 people, but, as Harrington reveals here, he was a good, ambitious man who dreamed of returning his family to the social status they enjoyed before Schmidt's father became an executioner. A sort of real-life companion to Oliver Potzsch's 2010 novel The Hangman's Daughter (which, like its sequels, is set in Germany in the mid-seventeeth century), the book opens a window on a profession and a period in history about which there are few primary sources.--Pitt, David Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Harrington's gruesome and enlightening latest (after The Unwanted Child), the career of German executioner Frantz Schmidt is used to paint a ghastly portrait of life in the "long sixteenth century." The book's backbone is Schmidt's remarkable journal, a laconic catalogue of 45 years of executions and reflections. Medieval class distinctions, held in place by heredity and Christian values, are dissected as the executioner attempts to expunge the "dishonorable" stigma from his family name (his father trained him in the "odious craft"). An anomaly for his time, the pious, sober executioner meticulously recorded the deeds of those he dispatched. From his retellings of various crimes-which run the gamut from slander to patricide-a sense of the medieval moral system emerges, as do Schmidt's own personal ethics and beliefs: contra the status quo, Schmidt, a proponent of "a more modern concept of individual identity," refused to "conflate social status and reputation." Juxtaposed against the moral underpinnings of barbaric justice in 16th-century Europe, Schmidt's journey to reconcile his profession with his faith and personal philosophies makes for a fascinating read. 39 illus., 2 maps. Agent: Rafe Sagalyn, Sagalyn Literary Agency. (Mar. 19) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Meister Frantz Schmidt of Nuremburg served as public executioner there from 1573 to 1618, when he retired. Over the course of those 45 years, he kept a journal, chronicling, in rather blunt seemingly nonchalant terms, the exercise of his responsibilities. The journal, both in its original German and in English translation, has been available in published form for scores of years. Though it has been considered a valuable primary source for the history of penal justice, its apparent lack of moral or internal reflection had not seemed to lend it well to social history-until now. Harrington (history, Vanderbilt Univ.; The Unwanted Child) seeks insights into Schmidt the man through his journal, while also using its narrative as a platform for his investigation into human nature and social progress. In his writings, Schmidt relates his 361 executions, along with his other avocations-he was also a healer-his yearning for social status, revealed in another document he wrote late in life, and his faith. Harrington's work is impressive and accessibly conveyed, with period illustrations for further-and sometimes unsettling-context. Verdict A fine example of social history that seeks the fuller and more complex story of some darker sides of human nature; a weighty, reflective, and rewarding read. Highly recommended.-Paul Roberts, Oklahoma Baptist Univ. Lib., Shawnee (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A sympathetic revelation of the surprisingly poignant inner life of a pious Lutheran executioner. A historian of early modern German history at Vanderbilt, Harrington (The Unwanted Child: The Fate of Foundlings, Orphans, and Juvenile Criminals in Early Modern Germany, 2009) has delved at length into a personal journal kept over a remarkable 45-year career by the executioner of Nuremberg, Frantz Schmidt; the journal reveals that he was keeping it for very public reasons. Schmidt began the journal at age 19 in 1573, when he was just an apprentice to his father, the executioner of Bamberg. After a stint as a journeyman, Schmidt attained the status of master by age 24 and procured a plum job in the thriving industry town of Nuremberg, where he plied his trade with exemplary dignity for the next 40 years, recording some 394 deaths and countless acts of flogging and torture. Some of the entries offer more detail than others, but overall, Schmidt shows he was a willing executioner, even a passionate one, in terms of his righteous sense of administering due punishment in the face of senseless, random injustice. He was also an abstemious, disciplined professional who brought rigorous standards to a trade notorious for its violence and instability. Moreover, Harrington reveals some subtle yet telling details in the journal, attesting to the scholar's expertise in German and his doggedness in going back to Schmidt's original manuscript rather than relying on later, edited versions. Despite its authorial diffidence, "an evolving self-identity became ever more pronounced," as Schmidt shows his obsession with social standing and a sense of righting his own familial injustice. What he wanted was what everyone strove for: a better life for his children. A whole teeming world of Reformation Germany comes alive in this well-handled historical reconstruction. An accessible, even inviting portrait of the professional killer, despite the gruesome detail.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
