Digging up the dead? This is weird.
Dammit ! this means several hundred additional democrat voters...
I gotta agree. As rotten as most of the Medici's were, the predelection of scientists to disturb graves--of people not that ancient either--is kind of disturbing.
You have to think that these people when they died, didn't expect their great-great....grand-kids to dig them up again just out of curiousity.
It's happening all over Europe, people who were given a decent Christian burial are now being exhumed, all in the name of science. I don't think the science to be learned for this makes up for the disrepect of the dead.
Knowing whether a Medici was poisoned, or had gout or arthritus, doesn't benefit the living enough to disturb private graves...just because they died centuries ago.
You wouldn't want your mother dug up by scientists curious about her ailments and anatomy, would you? Why is it then OK for your great-great-.....grandmother?
This blantantly prurient abuse of the dead is disgusting. Mere grave-robbing, with an academic overlay to make it respectable. Whether Piero had arthritis or Francesco was poisoned is of no consequence today, especially compared to the decent expectation to which we're all entitled that our own graves will not be raided for profit one day. Especially in view of the loyalty the last of the Medici preserved for their ancestral home -- an affection that enriches them to this day -- the Florentine cooperation in this desecration stinks of ingratitude and contempt for heritage.
Like abortion, grave-robbing was once something done in secret because it was seen to be sordid: in our own day sacredness is denied alike to the lives of the living the bodies of the dead. What fine civilised people we are.
A person's right to bodily inviolability survives his death. Consider the reasonable presumption that funereal rites reflect the expectations and wishes of the deceased. If we can see our way to defending a decedent's wishes in the matter of the disposal of his property with a fully developed jurisprudence, how can we then suggest that his burial wishes are of no consequence? Short of falling back on the argument that might makes right, I mean.
Please don't tell me that the jurisprudence of wills and successions exists only to impart order to a festival of booty on the part of the living. Any utilitarian theory such as this, designed to serve a social purpose, can be set aside when convenient to serve another social purpose later -- such as confiscatory esate taxes. Presumably most here would find that objectionable.
The only answer can be that wills and successions are a matter of natural law that recognises the rights even of the dead to have their wishes respected.
Of course I'm conflicted because I enjoy seeing archaeological artifacts as much as the next person. But grave goods are not sacred in any sense approaching that of the body itself. I'm vastly more interested in a decent respect, if reverence is too much to ask for, being paid to the corpse itself, than in his helmet or drinking cup or favorite hound. Of course I have no hope of this, as the dead left to their own devices are powerless in this power-worshippng world.