This is a riveting story of a forgotten practice. Throughout the history of Christianity there has been an odd reverence for the bones of dead saints. This tradition has been largely maintained to this day in the Catholic Church.
Holy Bones traces the history of relic keeping, finding, presenting and verifying along with the ancillary disciplines of pronouncing saintliness (as opposed to beatification as it is now), marketing pilgrimages and preserving bodies. The story goes from macabre leap of faith to obtuse theological arguments to denial of the practice to the semiotics of power. It is heady stuff, and thoroughly researched.
The book is let down, oddly enough particularly in the early chapters by odd, almost weak, editing. I would have expected more from a university press, especially such a hallowed institute. This goes from spelling; "monks who went a round..." to grammar; "the laws by which the natural world operate"; to difficult to decipher sentence structure (of which this is my own example).