Restless Corpse
The Restless Corpse is Marika Räsänen’s PhD thesis defended at the University of Turku, Finland, in 2013. The restless corpse refers to numerous transfers and translations of Thomas Aquinas’s body between the years after his death at the Cistercian monastery of Fossanova in 1274 and the translatio to the Dominican church of Toulouse in 1369.
Detecting of Thomas’s restless corpse once started at the Vatican library and the multiphase history of his relics still fascinates me as presented on this video clip, shot in Fossanova during the conference “Dai primings agile ultimi giorni di Tommaso d’Aquino” (in Italian, starts around 15min): https://vimeo.com/146564878#t=14m54s
I published my monograph Thomas Aquinas’s Relics as Focus for Conflict and Cult in Late Middle Ages: The Restless Corpse, in January 2017 (Amsterdam University Press), as the extended and revised version of the dissertation.
