The seeds of Wild Carrot / contraceptive

Small packages of wild carrot seed (Daucus carota) were included in one of the letters of the Lost Volumes. Each package contains one teaspoon of wild carrot seed, the amount a woman would need to chew as a ‘morning after’ contraceptive. There are numerous historical references to wild carrot seed as an anti-fertility agent. In works in the Hippocratic Corpus, Pliny the Elder, Dioscorides, Scibonius Largus, and Constantine the African, wild carrot seed is described as an abortifacient, emmenagogue or … Read More

Writing / Lost Volumes

At the edge of a field in West Flanders is a strange construction. A box of sorts, a brown, corrugated iron cabin with a steeply sloping roof that faces across fields towards a narrow channel of river. The construction has but a single window, vertical, two fists wide, that runs up the entire front face of it. From the field the box seems to rest lightly on the land. From across the river it seems to blend darkly into a … Read More