St. Juthwara with her severed head, from the 15th century Sherborne Missal in the British Library |
Scott Montgomery, a medieval art historian with an academic sideline in psychedelic rock posters, first started thinking about cephalophores when he was working on his dissertation on head reliquaries, the religious containers for the bones of saints. In the course of his research, he came across one very unique reliquary in which the saint is holding his head out, away from his body. He thought it was anomaly, until he kept finding more stories of headless saints.
The article mentions a number of cephalophores, including Saint Justus and Saint Denis. A fun read and an interesting topic!
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