Certainly one of the stranger parts (to me) of visiting old Catholic churches is seeing the reliquaries [1]. Since I'm an atheist, I don't really have particul

Certainly one of the stranger parts (to me) of visiting old Catholic churches is seeing the reliquaries [1]. Since I'm an atheist, I don't really have particularly strong feelings about what happens after I die (ideally: reasonably green, so composting seems better than cremation). And yet, it is weird to imagine my doctor or mortician taking some part of my body for their personal collection (imagine a tooth or finger). With that in mind, I understand these posts. Harvard: "whoa guys this is skin!" To "sorry we called you all guys [2], and sorry we were shocked and sensational in our discussion of this artifact" What should they do? It makes sense to have human attendants manage the book if you want it to be accessible in the collection. At least then they can warn would-be viewers (since that's a thing they want to do) They could just donate the book to a museum? Then nobody really touches it and it's probably well-preserved. They could remove (but preserve) the skin. I imagine that's what they've done, which seems ok. Anyone can use the book, researchers can study the skin The book-skin combo artifact doesn't seem particularly special to me - is it worth preserving as a whole unit? I'm surprised so many others in the comments think so [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliquary#:~:text=A%20reliquary%20(also%20referred%20to,is%20a%20container%20for%20relics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliquary#:~:text=A%20reliqu.... [2] this is a joke [3] thinking about this, I can't imagine human skin is the best binding for a book, but I do appreciate that it would be possible to say "I really don't care what happens to my skin" or to otherwise be ok with this. It doesn't seem like this was the case for this book, though.