Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found - Softcover

Frances Larson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783780568 ISBN 13: 9781783780563

Publisher: Granta, 2015

Synopsis

Our history is littered with heads. Over the centuries, they have decorated our churches, festooned our city walls and filled our museums; they have been props for artists and specimens for laboratory scientists, trophies for soldiers and items of barter. Today, as videos of decapitations circulate online and cryonicists promise that our heads may one day live on without our bodies, the severed head is as contentious and compelling as ever. From shrunken heads to trophies of war; from memento mori to Damien Hirst's With Dead Head; from grave-robbing phrenologists to enterprising scientists, Larson explores the bizarre, often gruesome and confounding history of the severed head. Its story is our story.

About this title

Review:

'Once again Frances Larson has crafted a uniquely fascinating and superlatively eloquent book on a disturbing but captivating subject. With a skilful blend of wit, insight and empathy, Larson explores the dark and largely uncharted world of severed heads to provide this powerful and illuminating book. Larson's engrossing account of the fraught business of head-hunting takes our lazy notions of civilised society's superiority over so-called primitive cultures and - so to speak - turns them on their head' --Wendy Moore, author of Wedlock and The Knife Man

'A fabulously quirky and gorily entertaining account of the dark and varied obsession that the 'civilised West' has had with decapitated heads and skulls. Larson takes us on a riveting tour of heads severed, shrunken, deposed, framed and dissected, from Oliver Cromwell's mummified bonce to Damien Hirst's platinum skull set with diamonds' --'Editor's Pick', Bookseller

'A completely original and compelling book: the unnatural history of severed heads. Heads as prizes, heads as art, heads as objects of instruction, heads as symbols of triumph over enemies. Frances Larson has written a unique history worthy of the great Roy Porter' --Richard Fortey, author of The Hidden Landscape and Life: An Unauthorised Biography

'Strangely compelling' --Big Issue in the North

'Engaging and readable... Severed is a fascinating curio of a history' --The Times

'An elegant history... Larson surveys the severed head in art, medicine, religion and criminology; her book is packed with bizarre and horrifying stories, fascinating facts and philosophical conundrums' --Independent on Sunday

'Fascinating' --'Must Reads', Sunday Times

'Severed offers a scholarly, grimly amusing and possibly definitive survey of an often disquieting subject' --Spectator

'Larson is a fine and careful writer. She is alive to the delicacy of the language needed, all the more appropriately given that much of what she describes is fascinatingly gruesome' --Evening Standard

'Elegantly argued and grimly compelling' ***** --Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Daily Telegraph

'Larson's compelling and anecdotal study explores the grim fascination of severed heads' ***** --Sunday Telegraph

'Fascinating' --Literary Review

'Larson's compelling and anecdotal study explores the grim fascination of severed heads' ***** --Sunday Telegraph

'An eloquent and provocative exploration of what the detached head means, one that reaches beyond today's desert atrocities into the core of human culture' --New Statesman

'A compelling historical narrative... Larson tells a very human account of an inhumane act'

'Squeamish readers might want to close this book after its initial pages yet find themselves compelled to keep 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, science, religion, warfare and crime...Objects and the stories they tell permeate Larson's work, and she has a talent for exploring the topic...Although the timeframe covered mainly predates jihadist beheadings, Severed has horribly timely insight to shed.'
Anita Sethi, the Observer --Observer

'Larson writes in the style of a flaneur. A connoisseur of severed heads from days spent in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford she wanders among the skulls with assurance and not a hint of a shiver, alighting on those that most interest her and arranging them in themes. The book is more of a clever, sometimes playful, conversation than a conventional study'

'Appalling, astute and grimly relevant.' - William Leith, The Evening Standard

'In this sparkling, though at times inevitably grim, book, Larson looks at severed heads throughout history...At a time when beheadings by extremists are beamed around the world online, Larson offers a timely discussion about the shift from criminals being decapitated for their crimes to criminals decapitating civilians - and the spectators who still wish to watch.'
Julia Richardson, Daily Mail --Independent

'A timely, disquieting, deeply thought-provoking and sometimes darkly funny history of decapitation'
'[This book] manages to be both scholarly and entertaining, Larson's dry tone is the perfect foil for her grisly subject matter. "Lively, original, important, astounding, well-written; first-class in every way", said the Sunday Times.' - The Sunday Express

'[Severed] is stuffed with extraordinary detail - on one occasion in 1804, 26 Frenchmen were dispatched in 27 minutes by a single guillotine. [But] Larson does not just focus on gore: she also writes keenly about the 19th century "craniological mania"...This engaging, intelligent book manages the extraordinary feat of not being ghoulish or morbid.' - Pick of the paperbacks, Robbie Millen - The Times

'This elegantly argued and grimly compelling cultural history examines how and why severed heads have such fascination, from Hamlet's musings on Yorick's skull to the experiments done on disembodied relics in the French Revolution.' - Five star review, Daily Telegraph --Book of the year, Times Higher Education

About the Author:

DR FRANCES LARSON is an honorary research fellow at the University of Oxford and the author of a biography of Henry Wellcome, An Infinity of Things, which was a Sunday Times Book of The Year and a New Scientist Best Book of 2009. She is also the co-author of Knowing Things (OUP, 2007), a book on the history of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, where she worked as a researcher after receiving her D.Phil.

About this edition

• Publisher: Granta
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1783780568
• ISBN 13: 9781783780563
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336