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

Harrington, Joel F.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809049929 ISBN 13: 9780809049929

Verlag: Hill & Wang Inc.,U.S., 2013

Inhaltsangabe

In the late 1500s a Nuremberg man named Frantz Schmidt began to do something utterly remarkable for his era: he started keeping a journal. But what makes Schmidt even more compelling to us is his day job. For forty-five years, Schmidt was an efficient and prolific public executioner, employed by the state to extract confessions and put convicted criminals to death. In his years of service, he executed 361 people and tortured, flogged, or disfigured hundreds more. Is it possible that a man who practiced such cruelty could also be insightful, compassionate, humane - even progressive? In his groundbreaking book, the historian Joel F. Harrington looks for the answer in Schmidt's journal, whose immense significance has been ignored until now. Harrington uncovers details of Schmidt's medical practice, his marriage to a woman ten years older than him, his efforts at penal reform, his almost touching obsession with social status, and most of all his conflicted relationship with his own craft and the growing sense that it could not be squared with his faith.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joel F. Harrington is a professor of history at Vanderbilt University. He is the author ofThe Unwanted Child, winner of the 2010 Roland H. Bainton Prize for History, as well asReordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany and A Cloud of Witnesses. He lives with his wife and two children in Nashville, Tennessee.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Hill & Wang Inc.,U.S.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0809049929
• ISBN 13: 9780809049929
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar