Digging up the dead is a grim practice. In the early days of medicine, students stole cadavers (often those of deceased Black people) in an effort to learn more about human anatomy. Within modern criminal cases, bodies of both the victims and the accused are often exhumed in an effort to establish innocence or guilt.
Meanwhile, some exhumations represent downright nasty instances of political jockeying in which the bodies of the dead have become pawns to the powerful.
Consider three of the strangest such incidents in history: the corpse of Italian Pope Formosus, who was dug up in the ninth century for a trial by his successor; the body of Dante Alighieri, whom Florence banished in life and spent years fruitlessly seeking in death; and Eva Perón, the first lady of Argentina who spent nearly two decades of her death in invisible exile in Italy.
Western Europe was highly tumultuous ...
