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The Executioner's Journal Joel F. Harrington

The Executioner's Journal By Joel F. Harrington

The Executioner's Journal by Joel F. Harrington


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Summary

During a career lasting nearly half a century, Frantz Schmidt (1554-1634) personally put to death 392 individuals and tortured, flogged, or disfigured hundreds more. All of this was recorded in his journal. Available now in Joel Harrington's new translation, this fascinating document provides the modern reader with a rare firsthand perspective on the thoughts and experiences of an executioner.

The Executioner's Journal Summary

The Executioner's Journal: Meister Frantz Schmidt of the Imperial City of Nuremberg by Joel F. Harrington

During a career lasting nearly half a century, Meister Frantz Schmidt (1554-1634) personally put to death 392 individuals and tortured, flogged, or disfigured hundreds more. The remarkable number of victims, as well as the officially sanctioned context in which they suffered at Schmidt's hands, was the story of Joel Harrington's much-discussed book The Faithful Executioner. The foundation of that celebrated work was Schmidt`s own journal--notable not only for the shocking story it told but, in an age when people rarely kept diaries, for its mere existence.

Available now in Harrington's new translation, this fascinating document provides the modern reader with a rare firsthand perspective on the thoughts and experiences of an executioner who routinely carried out acts of state brutality yet remained a revered member of the local community and was widely respected for his piety, steadfastness, and popular healing. Based on a long-lost manuscript thought to be the most faithful to the original journal, this modern English translation is fully annotated and includes an introduction providing historical context as well as a biographical portrait of Schmidt himself. The executioner appears to us not as the frightening brute we might expect but as a surprisingly thoughtful, complex person with a unique voice, and in these pages his world emerges as vivid and unforgettable.

About Joel F. Harrington

Joel F. Harrington is Centennial Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, USA, and the author of The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century and The Unwanted Child: The Fate of Foundlings, Orphans, and Juvenile Criminals in Early Modern Germany.

Additional information

NPB9780813938707
9780813938707
0813938708
The Executioner's Journal: Meister Frantz Schmidt of the Imperial City of Nuremberg by Joel F. Harrington
New
Paperback
University of Virginia Press
20160902
224
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
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