Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

New
Paperback
2015
$14.12

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.

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.

$14.12

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 336
Edition: 1
Publisher: Granta
Published: 01 Oct 2015
ISBN 10: 1783780568
ISBN 13: 9781783780563
Book Overview: A serious and seriously entertaining exploration of the dark and varied obsessions that the 'civilized West' has had with decapitated heads and skulls

Author Bio

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.