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

Dr FRANCES LARSON was, until recently, a curator at the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford. She is the author of a biography of Henry Wellcome, An Infinity of Things (OUP, 2009). Dr Larson now teaches anthropology at the University of Durham.

“Larson delves into the grotesque yet wildly fascinating topic of decapitation... [Her] lively, conversational tone turns these morbid objects into something more meaningful than a mere expression of the macabre.”
- Publishers Weekly

“A brilliantly original exploration of what it is to be human. . . . Her fluently sinuous prose is by turns meditative and disquieting―and always utterly compelling.”
- Helen Castor, author of She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth

“[W]ide-ranging and thoughtful... In an age where so many taboos are fading, the severed head retains its dreadful and sacred power.”
- Mike Jay, Wall Street Journal

“No need to explain why this nonfiction book made the top of my list... Despite the ghoulish subject, this is a closely researched, indeed, scholarly study of the bizarre customs of hunting, collecting, trading, displaying and otherwise bonding with other people’s heads.”
- Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

“This idiosyncratic history of decapitation... jumps between historical and recent examples, from the invention of the guillotine in the French Revolution to Damien Hirst’s self-portrait in a morgue... This morbid obsession, [Larson] argues, is common to all cultures―a realization that dawned on her when she worked at a museum that exhibited shrunken heads. Her book shares in this fascination―‘dangerous but irresistible’―and makes some distinctions between the forms it takes.”
- New Yorker