![]() ![]() It is, says Larson, ‘simultaneously a person and a thing’. ![]() Whether as ritual object, anthropological specimen, grisly aide-mémoire or (amazingly) domestic gewgaw, the severed human head has served many purposes. Among the lessons of this vagrant history of decapitation and display is the ease with which such ‘lumps of matter’, which once were parts of people, may be incorporated into daily life. The shrivelled brown head of Plunkett, immured in its elaborate vitrine, is one of many instructive relics or trophies in Severed, Frances Larson’s fascinating book. Consequent nightmares were all the more lurid because at St Peter’s Church in Drogheda – on a primary-school excursion, no less – I had looked in those very eyes, or at least their sockets, and imagined a July morning in London when the saint’s guts lay on the ground. As a child in Ireland in that decade, I knew all about Plunkett and his obscene end: my mother had hung a portrait of him in my bedroom, and I’d torment myself by turning it over to read an account of the execution – ‘his bowels taken out and burned before his eyes’. Three centuries later a scrap of linen that had touched part of his body was said to have cured an elderly Italian of her deadly disease, so Plunkett was canonised in 1975. ![]() He was hanged, drawn and quartered, and stray bits of his corpse were distributed among waiting friends. Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh, was the last Catholic martyr to die at Tyburn, in 1681. ![]()
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