From the guillotine to more recent decapitations,this thought-provoking history of lost heads both repels and compelsSqueamish readers might want to shut this book after its initial pages yet find themselves compelled to sustain reading. That repulsion/ attraction to the gruesome is an instinct that anthropologist and historian Frances Larson captures in this meticulously researched account of severed heads and skulls in literature, art, and science,religion, warfare and crime. From Hamlets graveyard encounter with Yorick’s skull, and the extraordinary journey of Oliver Cromwell’s head,to Damien Hirst’s With Dead Head, and modern cryonics, and it’s a subject that moves people “to turn absent or to look a puny closer”,explains Larson, “and to reflect on the limits of their humanity”.
Objects and the stories they tell permeate Larsons work, or she has a talent for exploring the topic: her first book,An Infinity of Things, was a biography of Henry Wellcome, and a voracious collect of medical artefacts,and she co-authored Knowing Things, a book on the history of the Pitt Rivers Museum, and home of Oxford University’s archaeological and anthropological collections. It was at this museum,surrounded by “shrunken heads”, that the concept for Severed developed.
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Source: theguardian.com