cover image A Tour of Bones: Facing Fear and Looking for Life

A Tour of Bones: Facing Fear and Looking for Life

Denise Inge. Continuum, $29.95 (224p) ISBN 978-1-4729-1307-4

This posthumously published travelogue-cum-memoir from theology scholar Inge (editor of Happiness and Holiness), who died in 2014, is a witty and poignant meditation on mortality. When Inge’s husband was appointed Bishop of Worcester Cathedral, the couple moved into the adjacent official residence, built atop a medieval Benedictine abbey’s charnel house. Intrigued, not disturbed, Inge undertook an investigation into the ancient practice of the “keeping of bones.” Her tour included four noted crypts: in Czermna, Poland, a mass grave from the Thirty Years’ War; in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic, skull pyramids and an infamous bone chandelier; hand-painted skulls amid the glaciers in a cave in Hallstatt, Austria; and in Naters, Switzerland, a chapel featuring a beinhaus (bone house). This skillfully composed book deftly draws on archaeology, physiology, theology, folklore, and literary antecedents from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a County Courtyard” to Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death. Inge had nearly finished the book when she was diagnosed with cancer, and for the final chapter she delved deeply into beliefs about life and death. “No one likes to talk about death, almost no one knows how to,” she notes. The crypts and ossuaries that Inge visited, and the book she wrote about them, are intended as memento mori—reminders of mortality. [em](Aug.) [/em] This review has been corrected. A previous version incorrectly listed the book's subtitle.