The faithful executioner

Frantz Schmidt (1555-1634) worked as the public executioner of Nuremberg for forty-five years. Between 1573 and his retirement in 1617 he kept a journal listing every execution and corporal punishment he carried out. He put 361 people to death and tortured, flogged or disfigured hundreds more.

This is narrative non-fiction, a biography built on that rarely studied journal. The historian Joel F. Harrington asks whether a man who inflicted such cruelty could also have been insightful, compassionate and humane, even ahead of his time. He looks for the answer in Schmidt's own record of his work.

Harrington draws out several strands of the executioner's life: his medical practice, his marriage to a woman ten years older than himself, and his attempts at penal reform. Schmidt also cares a great deal about social status. Above all, he is uneasy about his trade, which he increasingly finds hard to reconcile with his faith.

The book doubles as a portrait of Europe on the edge of modernity, a society divided by conflict and burdened by paranoia, superstition and abuses of power. It reads as an intimate life of one ordinary man, set against the brutal justice of his age, and Harrington links that past to present-day concerns.