2015 read #51: The Faithful Executioner by Joel F. Harrington.

The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century by Joel F. Harrington
256 pages
Published 2013
Read from September 15 to September 17
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

The understandable (but nonetheless frustrating) tendency among historians and other social scientists is to tease out any number of speculations and possible interpretations from thin skeins of evidence. Naturally, we want to build up as full a picture as possible from the primary sources at hand, but this almost guarantees that the resulting narrative will say more about our own (or at least the author's) values and cultural assumptions than it does about the worldview of the historical subject. Harrington stresses the "empathy" and "disgust" alternately discernible in the laconic, otherwise impersonal journal of Meister Frantz Schmidt, executioner for the city of Nuremburg in the sixteenth century, emotional responses Harrington uses to shore up his depiction of Schmidt as a man obsessed with honor (personal and familial) and social status. But Harrington surmises Schmidt's visceral reactions based on the number of words and amount of detail Schmidt devotes in his journal to each of the punishments he notates, e.g. Schmidt was appalled by breaches of the social contract in cases wherein servants rob their masters or destitute women kill their newborns. This is perhaps not wholly inaccurate, but as far as interpretive methodologies go, it seems especially flimsy, and Harrington's "honor and shame" storyline is rather simplistic. Hitching the interpretive narrative to one conceptual through-line is common enough, in academic works ranging from doctoral dissertations to popular paperback histories, but it is less than satisfying.

The Faithful Executioner makes up for its lack of nuance (which, admittedly, is largely concomitant with the lack of primary sources) by examining several fascinating and extremely underrepresented topics: the life and aspirations of common people, the activities and words of the underclass, and (let's be honest) the salacious details of long ago crime. Harrington's prose is dry but readable. I would have appreciated something like an appendix translating Schmidt's writings without Harrington's selective quotation, which perhaps could have bolstered what I felt were Harrington's more tenuous claims of Schmidt's perceptions and reactions (or perhaps not).