On one of our walking tours in the UK, we stopped at a 16th century mausoleum that had some interesting carvings and whatnot on the outside, including lots of skulls and crossbones. Our tour guide pointed them out to us and then explained that the skull and crossbones motif came about because of a decree by a pope. As you can imagine, he had my attention.

There was, he explained, a fear by crusaders that if they died far from home, God might somehow miss them in the resurrection. There was another fear that if you, say, lost an arm in battle, you’d be minus an arm in the afterlife as well. This, said the tour guide, was not good for the crusading efforts, so a pope wrote a letter that decreed that only the skull and two femurs were necessary to be resurrected completely; as a bonus, they were also easy to ship home to the family plot. Problem solved - Catholics, amirite?

We covered a lot of interesting ground over the last few years, and some of it tended towards the weird and interesting, but this was a new one for me. With some AI assistance and a whole lot of Googling, I have determined that this story is BS.

As best as I can tell, the decree he might have been referring to was Detestande feritatis, issued by Boniface VIII in 1299 and which specifically forbade a practice referred to as mons Teutonicus. This was the practice of boiling down the recently deceased to remove all flesh and leave only a skeleton behind, which could then be transported to the decedent’s preferred burial site. I haven’t been able to find the text of this online anywhere, but if you’d like to read more, have a look at “Death and the Human Body in the Later Middle Ages: The Legislation of Boniface VIII on the Division of the Corpse” by Elizabeth Brown (DOI:10.1484/J.VIATOR.2.301488) for historical context and some excellent analysis.

The skull and crossbones have apparently been used as memento mori for some time, irrespective of scholastic debates on the resurrection. There are several discussions about bodily integrity and the resurrection in the Summa, but nothing that I could find on Lord’s minimum requirements for work.

Anyway it was fun to root around a little bit.