Book Review: The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century

• Author: Sarah Britto
• Published date: 01 December 2019
• Date: 01 December 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1057567717750731

The Prison School provides a much-needed critical analysis of the role of public education as a

major contributor to mass incarceration and the ongoing oppression and forced migration of African

Americans. It highlights for us, again, that systemic racism is not the purview of a “few bad apple”

actors but exists within the very nature of the free market. Profiteering from relationships with public

schools, as Simmons argues, threatens the very democracy schools are meant to support.

Harrington, J. F. (2013).

The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century. New York, NY:

Picador. 283 pp. $19.00, ISBN 978-1-250-04361-0.

Reviewed by:Sarah Britto, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

DOI: 10.1177/1057567717750731

The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century

(2013) by Joel F. Harrington offers a unique window into the life of executioner, Meister Frantz

Schmidt, and in doing so challenges the one-dimensional caricatures of bloodthirsty and ghoulish

executioners often found in museums, history books, literature, and even the work of social theorists.

Harrington’s historical account of Schmidt’s life is pulled from the pages of Schmidt’s professional

journal and supplemented by archival documents from Nuremburg and the surrounding areas that

comprised Franconia in the 16th century. The grisly details of executions and torture are not avoided,

but neither are they the sole focus of this work. Instead, Harrington, through the discovery and

linkage of a number of important documents, is able to provide context for Schmidt’s gruesome

occupation and humanize his motives and desires.

The book begins with a brief account of Schmidt’s father’s unlucky enlistment into the profession

of executioner. Hienrich Schmidt, a woodsman, was pulled from a crowd and forced to perform an

execution for a young lord. From that point forward, Hienrich Schmidt and his family were marked

by the shame, fear, and revulsion associated with executioners in the middle ages. This fall from

grace was met with a singular devotion on the part of Hienrich and later his son Frantz to restore their

family’s lost honor. Ironically, the only imagined path to this goal was through the performance of

their duties as faithful executioners because all other legitimate trade opportunities were destroyed

by Hienrich’s initial execution. A “faithful” executioner was duty bound by the government that he

worked for as well as a divine belief in punishment as redemption.

Harrington presents the growing complexity of Frantz Schmidt’s story in stages: (1) The Appren-

tice who learns a trade, its rationalizations, and the consuming desire to restore honor to the family

name from his father as well as how to heal others to supplement his professional income; (2) The

Journeyman who builds a reputation for himself by honing his disreputable craft, avoiding

improprieties such as cavorting with women, imbibing in alcohol, and gambling; (3) The Master

who was officially given the position of the executioner of Nuremburg, wed, had children and

regularly demonstrated his skills in interrogations and executions; (4) The Sage who showed

mercy within the allowable boundaries of his official duties, for youth, contrition, crimes of

passion, and crimes committed out of poverty, and furthermore, Schmidt’s shows an unshakable

belief in “salvation by grace and faith alone” (p. 181), which may have offered him some solace

for the acts his profession required; and (5) finally, The Healer who upon retirement can focus on

his true calling as a physician and is able to officially regain his familial honor by petitioning

Emperor Ferdinand II.

380 International Criminal Justice Review 29(4)