[merrywhether]

The Hangman’s Daughter book series gives a pretty great look into this same topic, dramatic flair aside. They’re written by a modern descendent of a Bavarian executioner family who dug into his family’s past and then loosely tied some actual historical events into clever stories (basically the definition of historical fiction, I suppose). They were fun beach reads for me that also taught me a lot about 1600s German life.