the Trial of Dead Pope: Cadaver Synod and Bloody Politics Medieval Rome

A dead pope. A furious successor. A trial so grotesque that Rome spent years trying to undo it.In 897, Pope Stephen VI ordered the corpse of Pope Formosus exhumed, dressed in papal robes, seated before a church court, and prosecuted for crimes allegedly committed in office. A deacon was assigned to answer for the body. The verdict was never in doubt.But the Cadaver Synod was far more than medieval madness.In The Trial of the Dead Pope, Evelyn St. James reconstructs the rival kings, Roman factions, disputed coronations, clerical grudges, and legal maneuvering that made this infamous spectacle possible. Behind the mutilated corpse lay a serious struggle over who had the right to rule, who could confer legitimacy, and whether a new regime could erase the acts of the one before it.Witty, vivid, and grounded in the surviving evidence, this is true history at its strangest-and a gripping reminder that attempts to bury the past often make it impossible to forget.