An excerpt from Joel F. Harrington’s book The Faithful Executioners is a featured Longreads Members Pick and well worth a few minutes of your time.
Starting with a creative nonfictional account of an executioner in Germany in the 1500s, the piece opens up into a grim but fascinating overview of European life in the sixteenth century.
Some of it is nearly unimaginable for modern-day first-worlders (even the threat of arson was punishable by burning at the stake), while some of it is eerily familiar (a euphemism for torture was “special interrogation”).
