Book Review
Joel F. Harrington’s The Faithful Executioner is an exemplary work of microhistory. Harrington, a historian of early modern Europe and professor at Vanderbilt University, reconstructs the life of Meister Frantz Schmidt, the official executioner of Nuremberg between 1573 and 1617. The book is supported by legal and civic records of the time as well as other primary sources, but is mainly rooted in Meister Frantz’s journal, a unique document offering rare insight into life in early modern German society. As a microhistory, Meister Frantz’s life serves as a narrative through-line to illuminate the broader cultural, legal, and political transformations of sixteenth-century Germany, revealing the mentalities and social climate of the era. Moreover, Harrington’s prose is beautiful and accessible to any reader—in that way this book is similar to other microhistories about this era such as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms or Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre. What makes this work so compelling is Harrington’s choice of subject: an executioner who played a central role in crime and punishment in sixteenth-century Nuremberg. Harrington also helps us understand that Nuremberg was a society marked by profound insecurity—threats of plague, famine, criminal violence, and warfare. Meister Frantz himself lost his wife and four of his children to infectious outbreaks.
Harrington’s approach is carefully balanced. Regardless of Meister Frantz’s violent profession, Harrington resists reducing Meister Frantz to either stereotype or symbol, instead situating him in the complex cultural environment of early modern Nuremberg. We learn Meister Frantz is both an insider and outsider: isolated and scorned for his inherited profession, yet increasingly respected for his diligence, professionalism, and medical skill (surprisingly, it was common for executioners in this era to use their knowledge of the human body to work as healers on the side). Harrington’s reading of the journal highlights the centrality of family honor and personal reputation in sixteenth-century society. Executioners were themselves dishonorable and shunned in urban society, yet Meister Frantz’s determination to enhance his reputation and family name distinguished him from many of his peers. His long career, coupled with his work as a healer, brought many benefits: a high salary, citizenship, and ultimately enabled him to secure the restitution of his family’s honor from Emperor Ferdinand II.
The life of Meister Frantz enables Harrington to explore a number of fascinating historical topics. I was surprised that confessional conflicts were largely absent in Meister Frantz’s life. As a Lutheran, his journal shows little concern with accused criminals who happen to be Catholic. Also surprising was that Nuremberg largely avoided the witch hunts and prosecutions that swept much of the Empire at the time. Meister Frantz reflects the prevailing logic of civic order, rather than religious zeal, that seems to dominate Nuremberg’s elites. Civic elites relied on strict law enforcement and ritualized punishment to assert order and maintain control. These practices also prevented mob justice, vigilantism, and other lawlessness. Furthermore, at this time there were imperial efforts to codify law and standardize trial procedures and state punishments. The Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, Charles V’s legal code, attempted to get the various city-states and principalities to follow a consistent criminal code, setting out practices for the use of torture, standards for executioners, and guidelines for administering punishments.
What makes Meister Frantz particularly fascinating is his dual identity as executioner and healer. He treated thousands of patients, including members of the Nuremberg elite. In his later petition to the emperor, he stated that his true calling was to be a healer. This dual role complicates contemporary assumptions. Contrary to the cultural portrayal of executioners from the Romantic era that have lasted up to now, Meister Frantz was neither a sadist nor particularly righteous about dispensing justice. The only exception to this was his deep contempt for dishonorable criminals who abused trust and committed crimes using deception, revealing that this was a man with a strong moral code based on the importance he placed on personal honor.
In the book’s epilogue, Harrington positions himself against both Foucault and modern commentators such as Steven Pinker. He resists the tendency to caricature premodern punishment as pure cruelty in order to highlight progress and human achievement (Pinker) or to draw a stark contrast with modern disciplinary systems centered on surveillance, regulation, and internalized control (Foucault). Harrington takes the view that the crowds who gathered to watch Meister Frantz apply his trade were not fundamentally different from today’s masses of humans who have only seen cinematic portrayals of capital punishment. In contrast, Harrington argues that what separates us from Meister Frantz’s world are two developments: the rise of modern criminal investigation techniques involving bodies of evidence, thereby making torture and confession less necessary and, relatedly, the widespread belief in the concept of inalienable human rights, which limits state violence and emphasizes the treatment of individuals as ends in their own right.
Here, however, I find Harrington less convincing. I believe he reveals an ideological prior that holds liberal democratic capitalism and the Western world in contempt. Criminal science, evidentiary standards, due process, the rule of law, and human rights are products of the Enlightenment’s intellectual and political framework. These were not merely “developments” but byproducts of the establishment of liberal democratic capitalist states. Furthermore, Harrington’s attempt to equate early modern punishment with today’s actual and potential atrocities—genocide, atomic destruction, and total war—is an inapt comparison that rings hollow. Contemporary objections to capital punishment focus on inhuman cruelty, denial of due process, and violations of basic human rights. By contrast, ordinary Nuremberg citizens may have had varied responses to executions, but by and large they expected to see a “good death” for the condemned, one that reaffirmed civic order and made the community pure in the eyes of God. A botched execution was scandalous not because of humanitarian sentiment, but because it disrupted the execution ritual. While Harrington is right to push back against Pinker and other public intellectuals who tend to oversimplify history, he risks a different distortion by minimizing the profound moral and political transformations that separate early modern justice from modern conceptions of rights. The gulf between these worlds cannot be collapsed by pointing to human cruelty across eras; it rests in the creation of institutions and ideas that remain foundational today. I find it hard to believe a reasonable person cannot see that progress has been made between then and now.
Despite the few disagreements I have with Harrington’s argument in the conclusion, I think The Faithful Executioner succeeds brilliantly as microhistory. Harrington recovers the life of a man trapped in dishonor yet striving for dignity, hoping for a better life for his children, while also revealing the legal, cultural, and political frameworks of early modern Germany. At its best, the book challenges us to think carefully about how punishment, honor, and civic order once worked—and what has truly changed since. This is an excellent and thought-provoking book, one that forces us to take seriously the world of Frantz Schmidt rather than reduce it to either Gothic fantasy or crude analogy.
Joel F. Harrington, The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).