A Trial of Bones: Novel the Cadaver Synod

In January 897 a pope put a corpse on trial.Nine months after his burial, Formosus is taken from the sarcophagus in the portico of the popes, dressed again in pontifical vestments, and seated on the Lateran cathedra. The charge list is short. Perjury. Uncanonical translation. The exercise of priestly office by a man bound to lay status. A deacon is ordered to answer for him.That deacon is Damasus, of the diaconia of San Giorgio in Velabro. In Naples the canonist Auxilius begins the argument that will take a decade to write: if Formosus's acts fall, every man he ordained falls with him. In Rome, Sergius of Caere helps build the proceeding and counts what the cascade will return to him.The hostile acta were later ordered destroyed. What survives is the event, not the transcript. This novel reconstructs the four days of the chamber, the seven-bishop panel, the unvesting and the river, and the seven years that follow: rehabilitation, exile, and the synod that puts the verdict back in force.A Trial of Bones reconstructs the Cadaver Synod and the ordination crisis that outlived it. Latin offices and canons are kept where an English substitute would blur the distinction at issue. A note on sources and a glossary follow the narrative.Read it if you want the proceeding itself: the record, the cost to the parishes, and the men who had to live inside both.