(Ebook) Public Uses of Human Remains and Relics in History by Silvia Cavicchioli (editor), Luigi Provero (editor) ISBN 9780367272722, 0367272725

(Ebook) Public Uses of Human Remains and Relics in History by Silvia Cavicchioli (editor), Luigi Provero (editor) ISBN 9780367272722, 0367272725

The relationship between the living and the dead is central in any historical context: human remains weigh on and affect the world of the living, who as a result work and fight for control over bodies and burial places. Venerated, collected and studied, or else repudiated, forgotten and rediscovered, human remains and relics ensure a continuity with the past, and in some contexts receive new force and efficacy.1 As has recently been noted, “in their physicality relics are only contingent material objectifications of ideas and gestures endowed with their own specific and historicised genealogies.”2 There is therefore a basic tension which arises from the desire to manage and manipulate the meanings of these remains, the past and the history which they convey.In the West, over the centuries the preservation of human remains and the veneration of relics have been most widespread in the religious sphere, in the awareness of a continuation of life after death.3 In similar ways political authority has resorted to using human remains of the past to root and legitimise its strength, and to propagate its prestige.4 Secular power then created its own relics, enabling the processes of transferring sacredness from the religious to the political level. These re-semantifications appear very evident from the French Revolution onwards and then throughout the contemporary era, in the Italian case giving rise to extremely interesting case studies during Fascism.5In this volume we consider a broad notion of “human remains,” not necessarily celebrated or venerated. The object of our investigation in fact encompasses a diversity of human remains (real or imagined), such as those of saints (not least the crucified body of Jesus), of kings and of famous people, as well as unidentified corpses. And that diversity has a vast range of components, different in substance and in nature: whole bodies and parts of them, and even so-called contact relics. The research collected here intends to…