Morbid Taste for Bones -- Term Paper

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Part of the delight of reading a Morbid Taste for Bones is that the relatively limited nature of science means that the author of the work must focus on human character, rather than laboratory means of detecting the criminal. There is no implicating DNA evidence to be found on a bow and arrow. But there is also a very 21st century emphasis on the value of reason in all of the books. When Rhisart is killed, at first people assume it is because he objected so strenuously to the removal of the saint's remains. His death is seen as a judgment, rather than having a human cause. Cadfael is immediately suspicious. Likewise, when Brother Columbanus temporarily loses his reason, the prior and Brother Jerome search for divine causes, not earthly ones. A pilgrimage is seen as the solution, not medicine because that is the primary way that life was interpreted during Cadfael's day. However, Cadfael, because he has seen life from the perspective of many cultures, and because he has seen more examples of human folly than the majority of the other monks, takes the perspective of these events likely to be viewed by a modern reader, rather than a medieval reader. This causes the reader to trust Cadfael more than the other monks, and to identify with Cadfael more than the other characters in the story.

Even though it could be argued that Cadfael's perspective may be more rational than most persons who lived during the era, almost to the point of being an anachronism, the book provides a compelling picture of how important relics and pilgrimages were to the social life of the era. People traveled for hundreds of miles, when travel by foot or horseback was hard and brutal, merely to be blessed with the sight of the remains of a saint.

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Places became famous, and prospered, if they housed the relics of popular saints. The violence of the era is also chronicled over the course of the book -- although it is a murder mystery, death was not uncommon. Many people died in the frequent wars that tore apart the land. The book describes the current civil war between the Empress Maud and King Stephen, the tensions between England and Wales, and also notes that St. Winifred herself was beheaded. But even in this environment, a good man, not a saintly man, but a good man like Cadfael strives to see that the guilty are punished and the innocent are freed. Justice is done.

Morbid Taste for Bones is a paradox. On one hand, it satisfies contemporary desires for a good mystery tale. But it can also be read as a book that brings the events of the Middle Ages to life, making artistic stained glass figures and static pictures of saints seem alive to the imagination. It makes the reader care about characters and events of long ago, and even if not every detail of the book is perfectly accurate, it arouses the reader's curiosity to learn more about history, long after the crime has been solved by Cadfael.

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