All human life, and a lot of human death, is here in Eamon Duffy's Royal Books and Holy Bones: Essays in Medieval Christianity. Topics include relics and saints’ cults, pilgrimage, early codices, the history of childhood, royal book-collecting, crusades, the birth of musical notation, monasticism, blood libels, alabaster work, medieval hoaxes, and the cultural impact of plague, in the seventh as well as in the fourteenth century – when, according to one Italian observer, the dead were stacked in pits like the layers in lasagne.