The Faithful Executioner

Zusatztext

<p>Meet Frantz Schmidt: executioner, torturer and, most unusually for his times, diarist.</p><p>Following in his fathers footsteps, Frantz entered the executioners 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.</p><p>Through examination of Frantzs 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?</p><p><i>The Faithful Executioner</i>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.</p>

Autorenportrait

Following a distinguished academic career teaching and studying the history of Europe, Joel Harrington is currently Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He specializes in the Reformation and early modern Germany, with a particular interest in social history. Among his previous publications are<i>A Cloud of Witnesses</i>,<i>Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany</i>and<i>The Unwanted Child</i>, for which he won the 2010 Roland Bainton Prize for History.

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