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 gradually emerged was not that of a monster. Could a man who practiced such cruelty also be insightful, compassionate--even progressive?
In "The Faithful Executioner," Harrington teases out the hidden meanings and drama of Schmidt's journal. Deemed an official outcast, Meister Frantz sought to prove himself worthy of honor and free his children from the stigma of his profession. Harrington uncovers details of Schmidt's life and work: the shocking, but often familiar, crimes of the day; the medical practice that he felt was his true calling; and his lifelong struggle to reconcile his craft with his religious faith.
In this groundbreaking and intimate portrait, Harrington shows us that our thinking about justice and punishment, and our sense of our own humanity, are not so remote from the world of "The Faithful Executioner."

Throughout the many political and social upheavals of the early modern era, names were words to conjure by, articulating significant historical trends and helping individuals and societies make sense of often dramatic periods of change. Centered on onomastics-the study of names-in the German-speaking lands, this volume, gathering leading scholars across multiple disciplines, explores the dynamics and impact of naming (and renaming) processes in a variety of contexts-social, artistic, literary, theological, and scientific-in order to enhance our understanding of individual and collective experiences.

Meet Frantz Schmidt: executioner, torturer and, most unusually for his times, diarist. Following in his father's footsteps, Frantz entered the executioner's trade as an Apprentice. 394 executions and forty-five years later, he retired to focus his attentions on running the large medical practice that he had always viewed as his true vocation. Through examination of Frantz's exceptional and often overlooked record, Joel F. Harrington delves deep into a world of human cruelty, tragedy and injustice. At the same time, he poses a fascinating question: could a man who routinely practiced such cruelty also be insightful, compassionate - even progressive? The Faithful Executioner is the biography of an ordinary man struggling to overcome an unjust family curse; it is also a remarkable panorama of a Europe poised on the cusp of modernity, a world with startling parallels to our own.

The baby abandoned on the doorstep is a phenomenon that has virtually disappeared from our experience, but in the early modern world, unwanted children were a very real problem. In The Unwanted Child, Joel F. Harrington skillfully recreates sixteenth-century Nuremberg to explore what befell abandoned children in this period in vivid detail. From the harrowing to the inspiring, this critically acclaimed text paints a gripping picture of life on the streets five centuries ago.

This book examines the impact of the Protestant Reformation on both the ideal and practice of marriage in sixteenth-century Germany. Unlike previous specialized and esoteric monographs, this study synthesizes the author's extensive archival work with a broad array of scholarly research in legal, theological, and, especially, social history. His most important conclusion is the minimal impact of Protestant marriage reforms, and the striking similarity in this respect to concurrent Catholic measures, particularly in the actual formation and preservation of marriages.

This book examines the impact of the Protestant Reformation on both the ideal and practice of marriage in sixteenth-century Germany. Combining extensive archival work with a broad synthesis of scholarly research in legal, theological, and social history, it provides the most comprehensive evaluation to date of the Reformation's impact on marriage. The author compares Protestant reforming goals and achievements to those of contemporary Catholics. All sixteenth-century campaigns to restore 'traditional family values', he argues, must be viewed in the context of more gradual social transformations in private morality, public authority, and familial relations. The apparent innovations of the reformers - including the abolition of clerical celibacy and introduction of divorce - fade in comparison to their much greater adherence to the theological, legal and social traditions shared with their Catholic ancestors and contemporaries.

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.