Crypt: Life, Death and Disease in the Middle Ages and Beyond
Alice Roberts
Simon & Schuster, £22, 352 pages
Alice Roberts’s new book is the f nal instalment of a trilogy, which looks at death and burial using a “synthesis of history, archaeology and genetics”. In Crypt, unlike in her other books, Professor Roberts incorporates the study of disease. The result is a fine-grained yet elusive insight into moments in time. As Roberts explains in the epilogue, “archaeology is not the handmaiden of history”. Bone and biomolecules provide information about the past that is relatively free from the bias of historians.
