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A review by siria
The Bone Chests by Cat Jarman
informative
2.75
An accessible and energetic but ultimately slightly disappointing book, The Bone Chests uses a set of chests in Winchester Cathedral containing the remains of several individuals as a jumping-off point for an overview of early English history. The outside of the chests bear the names of those supposedly buried within—various royals and high-ranking ecclesiastics—and the bones have recently undergone forensic analysis in the hopes that their identities might one day be more securely identified. Cat Jarman provides overviews of the lives and careers of those—William Rufus, Emma, Stigand, and more—whose remains are traditionally said to be held in the chests, interspersed with some discussion of forensic archaeological techniques and a little about the chests' later history and reception.
For what it is, it's fine if a bit disjointed, and Jarman writes with verve, but I couldn't help but feel that she'd missed a trick with her framing. This is a fairly standard political history with an appealing hook. I know it's bad form to critique someone for not having written a different kind of book, but I felt like there was another way of approaching these chests: to think about them in terms of the history of medieval burial practices, of memorialisation; to do a deeper dive into what skeletal remains and aDNA can show us; and to perhaps ask in what ways medieval and 21st century ways of thinking about the dead are similar or different. Jarman briefly at the end considers why conclusively identifying these remains matters, but I would have liked to see her think more about how ideas of pilgrimage and burial ad sanctos live on in the present day.
For what it is, it's fine if a bit disjointed, and Jarman writes with verve, but I couldn't help but feel that she'd missed a trick with her framing. This is a fairly standard political history with an appealing hook. I know it's bad form to critique someone for not having written a different kind of book, but I felt like there was another way of approaching these chests: to think about them in terms of the history of medieval burial practices, of memorialisation; to do a deeper dive into what skeletal remains and aDNA can show us; and to perhaps ask in what ways medieval and 21st century ways of thinking about the dead are similar or different. Jarman briefly at the end considers why conclusively identifying these remains matters, but I would have liked to see her think more about how ideas of pilgrimage and burial ad sanctos live on in the present day.