Fully dressed and preserved 350-year-old corpse of French noblewoman found
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Real question: what will we learn from examining this body from 300 years ago? My understanding is that we have plenty of artifacts and knowledge left from that time period. Are we primarily interested in her cause of death? her diet?
http://www.poweredbyosteons.org
From a more specifically historical point of view, it's true that we know quite a lot about 17th century material culture (especially of France) due to probate records from wills, and the survival of many pieces in museums, etc. But it's still interesting to see the divergence between textual records of burials and belongings and how they actually played out in practice, especially because most museum pieces are completely decontextualized from the original context (i.e., we might have some cork-soled shoes that survive in other collections, but these ones are still on the feet of the wearer).
For some reason that I've never heard explained, living a holy life (according to Catholic and Orthodox Christian measures) sometimes has the effect of retarding the process of decay after death. I used to suspect the stories of incorruptible saints as being frauds perpetrated to advance the agenda of the Catholic Church, but as I have learned more, it has happened too many times in too many different ways for me to think that anymore. In the case of this French noblewoman, no one is trying to advance the cause of her canonization. She was found accidentally, seemingly by someone who has no interest in Catholic saints.
Convents and holy sites are much more likely to remain undisturbed. In many other western european sites, every other inch of land has been farmed continuously for centuries, making it unlikely to find an undisturbed body. This wealthy woman was in a lead coffin at a convent, and was probably much better protected from the elements than 99.99% of her contemporaries.
However, I don't think your explanation is sufficient because decay usually begins immediately upon death due to the presence of organisms already in the body before death. Sealing the coffin would not prevent such decomposition.
There are a lot of ways a dead body can stay dry and a lot of dead bodies out there to discover.
Sure it does.
> Why would the body be preserved without the soul?
As a sign of God's power, as a message to others, the same as any other miracle.
Well sure, but you might as well point out the stain in the corner is a "sign of God's power". It seems to me the "correct" approach would be to appreciate the ineffability of what happened, not make ridiculous claims about holiness causing preservation when there is literally no rational implication of this.
Because that soul and body formed a person who was more holy than most, and thus sanctified his (or in this case, her) body, which is thereby preserved from the corruption which normally afflicts corpses in a fallen world.
In Orthodox thought, bodies and souls are of equal importance (rather than the Gnostic idea of the living soul animating an essentially dead body). An Orthodox thinker would say that we are our bodies (unlike many Western Christians), but not just our bodies (unlike a materialist).
Unless we have some corpse preservation domain experts involved in this discussion, I generally tend to suspect that these "outlier" examples of corpse conditions are just misunderstandings by lay people. It doesn't help that death and handling of corpses is not a widely-discussed topic in most cultures.