Mos Teutonicus

[2] The process involved the removal of the flesh from the body, so that the bones of the deceased could be transported hygienically from distant lands back home.

[note 1] English and French aristocrats generally preferred embalming to Mos Teutonicus, involving the burial of the entrails and heart in a separate location from the corpse.

[8] Embalming and Mos Teutonicus, along with tomb effigies, were methods of giving the corpse an illusion of stasis and removed the uneasy image of putrefaction and decay.

[8] In 1270, the body of King Louis IX, who died in Tunis, which was Muslim territory, was subject to the process of Mos Teutonicus for its transportation back to France.

[7] Medieval society generally regarded entrails as ignoble[8] and there was no great solemnity attached to their disposal, especially among German aristocrats.

[7] Although the Church had a high regard for the practice, Pope Boniface VIII was known to have an especial repugnance of Mos Teutonicus because of his ideal of bodily integrity.

[11] This may have hindered anatomical research, if anatomists feared repercussions and punishment as a result of medical autopsies, but De Sepulturis only prohibited the act of Mos Teutonicus, not dissection in general (medieval physicians were known to have widely practiced dissection and autopsy, though most had an assistant perform the actual incisions and manipulations of cadavers[12]).