His first book explores the charnel houses and ossuaries situated through Europe, while his second book looks at the the spectacular jewelled skeletons known as the "catacomb saints"
These books are interesting in how they explore not only the subjects but how today's society view them in contrast to the contemporary people back then viewed "catacomb saints" for example in the the late 1500s with numbers of the saints peaking in the late seventeenth century and then gradually tapering off through the nineteenth/18 hundreds.
The "catacomb saints" came to be after the Protestant Reformation in which many catholic relics were destroyed in German speaking regions of Europe.
"These skeletons were appointed with the most expensive garniture not simply as a luxury but as a dazzling display of the rewards offered by God to members of the Catholic Church."
Here is an extract from the Empire of death;
"To understand the great charnel houses we must first acknowledge that death itself is not a fixed concept. The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, one of the greatest cultural theorists of the modern era, defined death as being simply the line of demarcation that separates the dead from the living. Within that axiomatic statement is an important implication: the line can be fluid. The process of living inevitably brings the cessation of life, but death as a concept is an intellectual construction that can vary from society to society and era to era."
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