Wednesday, August 31, 2016

The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century, Joel F. Harrington

Lukas Mayer, Execution of Peter Stumpp, 1589
(October 13) I got interested in this book because of Daniel Mallory Ortberg's review on The Toast, which is a great piece because ...yeah… that’s not how I pictured “being broken on the wheel.”

So I read the book for that but enjoyed it for much more than the small issue of the wheel… it’s a lot of good research, which is always a pleasure to read, and it is quite eye-opening on a number of the conditions of living in the 16th century…I felt quite grateful to be living in modern times early on and more so as the book developed.

But the book is pretty gruesome… Harrington doesn’t belabor the grisliness but you can’t help describing a lot of punishments and torture mechanisms when writing a biography of an executioner ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Nonetheless, I was really taken aback by the descriptions of life in a big city in the 16th century and, maybe because of our current times, sensitive to how racist and classist people were. The caste system I would have only ever expected to see in India was completely intact in 16th-century Nuremberg and so presumably throughout Europe. Life was brutal and difficult just on the most practical level but on top of that people really tried to take advantage of other people (or at least it seems so through the executioner’s eyes).

So the century seems so foreign and far away, and yet -- this was the most striking thing -- people were doing exactly the same things to be cheeky, to play jokes, to have fun as people do today… and they used the same swear words and “dirty” words and phrased them the same way.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose… only I should be quoting this in German.

To sum up: fascinating and eye-opening

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