We also know from his own words in his appeal to the emperor to restore that lost honor that his grandfather, father, and his own children all felt the sting of this stigma. JH: I have no doubts that as a child, Frantz Schmidt was repeatedly told the tale of his family’s fall from grace, especially since he can still remember so many details even as an old man. Certainly he accomplished this marvelously in the end, but I’m curious how firm do you feel is the inference that this was his specific intent from the start? Harrington was good enough to chat with Executed Today.**ĮT: Your book is built around a sort of life’s mission by Frantz Schmidt to return himself and his family to respectable-ness. Joel Harrington of Vanderbilt has authored a new book titled The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century, a fascinating account not only of Frantz Schmidt’s life but the world he inhabited. He freed himself and his heirs from the social pollution inherent to his life’s work. Either as cause or consequence of this, the profession carried its own stigma for underworld less-than-respectable behavior it was not unheard-of for a shady executioner to wind up climbing the scaffold as patient rather than hangman.īut in his 45-year career, the sober Meister Frantz operated with ahead-of-his-time dignity and sobriety, so much so that Schmidt was granted citizenship in Nuremberg and eventually had his civic honor officially restored. Nuremberg executioner Frantz Schmidt at work in 1584.Įxecutioners occupied a strange outcast social niche, with charge not only of death sentences but of other dishonorable public tasks.
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