Can we learn something new about the subject of executions? With this volume in hand, I would definitely say yes. To begin with, there are the often surprising or intriguing details. We hear about the playing of bagpipes during a procession with heads upon the points of swords; about surgeons entering a house where a murder took place in order to dissect, not the victim, but the perpetrator; about the precision and workmanship required for the production of a cage for hanging a body in chains; about an English scholar recommending parts of the Qing Code to European nations; about the impracticality of putting human corpses on display in a country where they would attract leopards and lions; and about a British lieutenant colonel hesitatingly removing flowers from a German gravesite. To remain in Germany, the third of these cases reminds me of perhaps the most notorious person in history to be gibbeted: Joseph Oppenheimer, the original Jud Süss. As the Jewish financial advisor to the Catholic Duke of Württemberg, he fell victim to his Protestant opponents after the Duke’s demise, which resulted in a death sentence in 1738. For the exposure of Oppenheimer’s executed body, which turned out to last for 6 years, his judges had a special construction made with a cage on top of the gallows, to belie his statement that ‘they cannot hang me higher than the gallows’.