The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century

by Joel F. Harrington

Neither death by the wheel nor burning at the stake appears likely to make a comeback in the near future (we hope), but rises in criminality anywhere—real or perceived—still reliably generate popular calls for less constrained means of investigation and harsher punishments of convicted felons. Many modern regimes still employ systematic torture—without any of the legal constraints of sixteenth-century Nuremberg—and other governments (including my own, the United States) have deliberately blurred the line between acceptable and unacceptable coercion during criminal interrogations. Capital punishment is still practiced in fifty-eight countries, most prolifically in China and Iran (with combined 2011 execution figures in the thousands), but also in self-proclaimed liberal democracies such as the United States and Japan.