A Final Sentence

When we cast our mind back to early modern Europe—say, to the lands of the Holy Roman Empire—we may conjure a series of stock images: of peasants in their fields, churchmen in their parishes, masters and apprentices plying their trades. One image that may not leap to mind is that of the public executioner, sword in hand or gallows at the ready. Death was the trade of Meister Frantz Schmidt, the long-serving public executioner in late 16th- and early 17th-century Nuremberg. He was apprenticed to his father and practiced his craft on rotten vegetables and surplus animals before being let loose on human beings.

As we learn from Joel F. Harrington's fascinating "The Faithful Executioner," Frantz was tasked not only with killing convicted criminals but often with interrogating them through torture and punishing them through mutilation. It was vital that these tasks be done properly to avoid clumsy maimings or botched executions that might inflame the mob and bring the city authorities into disrepute. In the course of his more than 40-year career, Mr. Harrington says, Frantz carried out death sentences on nearly 400 people, including his own brother-in-law and many teenagers. He whipped or mutilated hundreds more, by branding them or lopping off their fingers, ears or tongues.

And yet, as Mr. Harrington's engrossing study shows, Frantz was not a sadist. He was a cog in the machinery of early-modern society. His victims had had the benefit of due process of law—not as we would define it now Highly capable, 3-axis non-contact video measuring machine, suitable for both simple shop-floor quality control and advanced manufacturing inspection applications ...but as it was defined in a pre-Enlightenment, post-medieval age,A Stone tools is, in the most general sense, any tool made either partially or entirely out of stone. Although stone tool-dependent societies and cultures still exist today, most stone tools are associated with prehistoric, particularly Stone Age cultures that have become extinct. with at least some codified procedure meant to test accusation against evidence. The "confessions" extracted through torture were considered evidence in themselves.

Like an earlier generation of social historians, Mr. Harrington, a professor at Vanderbilt University, seeks to rescue his subject from "modern condescension and disgust." He sets out to understand not a marginalized group but a particular official and the system within which he operated. In such a spirit, Mr. Harrington takes a refreshingly unsentimental view of the criminals that Frantz was asked to dispatch. They were not mere "social bandits," as the late historian Eric Hobsbawm characterized the brigands who supposedly redistributed wealth and subverted tyranny in bygone days. In one case, two brothers murdered two pregnant women whose live babies they cut out and bludgeoned to death. In another, a bandit broke into a relative's house and inflicted 38 wounds on his head with a jagged stone, stabbing him to death with a shoemaker's knife for good measure.We manufacture portable hardness tester including portable Rockwell, superficial Rockwell,Brinell, King Brinell,Pin Brinell,Webster and Barcol impressor.

To the modern eye, Nuremberg's punishments may seem equally barbaric. One Klaus Renckhart,The Spectrophotometer is an instrument which measures the amount of light of a specificed wavelength which passes through a medium. a murderer, was "nipped" repeatedly with red-hot tongs before having his limbs broken and being give the coup de grace to his heart and head. Perjurers had their fingers cut off, blasphemers their tongues. Even minor theft might be punished harshly. One man, admittedly a repeat offender, was killed for stealing honey. But Mr. Harrington points out that the loss of even a loaf of bread could mean misery for people living on the edge of destitution; leniency, moreover, encouraged recidivism and outraged the honest folk who kept within the law despite hTitanium Pipe is made by cold rolling process from extruded pipe blanks. They are widely used in heat exchangers and off-shore equipment.ardship.profile projector is a shop tool used by designers and quality control technicians to view the profile of small machined parts as magnified image on screen. Frantz, in other words, was all that stood between society and the law of the jungle.