Publisher's Synopsis
Frantz Schmidt was for 45 years the public executioner in the city of Nuremberg, whose job was to inflict physical punishments, including death. Remarkably for a 16th century public officer, Schmidt kept a journal, in which he detailed not only his work but also his family life, faith, efforts towards penal reform & his medical practice. Revealing inner conflicts, concerns about the world around him & details of ordinary life amid the paranoia, supersitition & abuses of power that so marked the dawn of the modern age, Schmidt's is a remarkable testament.
