Here's an interesting bit from a review. Note the two sentences in bold. They point out what governments sometimes do to keep the population in line. So are public executions instruments of coercion?
Frantz Schmidt was a master executioner. He had a notarized certificate to prove it. He apprenticed under a master; he paid his journeyman's dues. He mostly worked in the imperial city of Nuremberg during his forty-five years of service, 1573-1618. He executed 394 people: men, women, and some boys and girls. Schmidt, always poised, delivered a good death, whether he beat you to kingdom come with a wagon wheel or applied the pitch and touched the flame, slipped the noose or cut off your head.
A "good death" was meant to shock and awe the locals, to keep them ruly in the absence of any effective central authority during some seriously unruly times. Executions were carefully orchestrated, ritualized brutality that sated the drive for retribution, with clear rules and conduct. The fathers of Nuremberg, a city then at the zenith of its power and wealth, hired Frantz Schmidt: reliable, honest, pious, reflective, loyal, sober Frantz, a rare bird in the world of executioners. Literate, too, and Joel Harrington's The Faithful Executioner has drawn on Schmidt's personal journal to shape an involved and evolved portrait of this terrible, ancient, and utterly familiar instrument of state violence, one who here inspires gawps of horror and aches of pity.
