Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Long before sci-fi there were the Venetians, whose ghoulish mania for stealing the corpses of saints is one of the odder perversities that criss-cross their history. Of course they had nothing to do with the origins of the cult of relics: credit for that goes mostly to Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th century, who for the glory of the Church shamelessly exploited the superstitions of his age by putting the papal seal of respectability on the cult of relics, miracles and saints. Praying to or, better yet, owning a bit of a saint was like having a hot-line to him or her in Heaven.

For centuries mouldering bones and withered cadavers (some kept ‘uncorrupted’ with arsenic and wax) were the greatest status symbol a city could hope for, and competition for the ones deemed most influential was intense. A prime candidate for sainthood, like Catherine of Siena, would scarcely breathe her last before the relic-mongers started pulling apart her anatomy (Venice, a bit slow off the mark that time, only managed to come away with a foot).