• my devoted head

    Johnson's 1755 Dictionary offers us the appropriate definitions for this period, definitions
    virtually lost to modern English usage:

    To addict; to give up to ill.
    To curse; to execrate; to doom to destruction.

    For the second meaning Johnson helpfully cites the Satanic legions in Paradise Lost,
    V.890.

    The phrase "devoted head" is so common a usage as to appear to be a customary eighteenth-century
    idiom.