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The Kings Two Bodies Tonight
The Kings Two Bodies Tonight
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Representations.
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REP106_06 3/4/09 2:39 PM Page 102
BERNHARD JUSSEN
Somehow
A B S T R A C T Ernst Kantorowicz’s central image of the king’s doubled body has been very influential,
but his main concern, medieval constitutional history, has gone largely unnoticed. His long-term consti-
tutional narrative has hardly been discussed, and his methodological endeavor—he once called it “con-
stitutional semantics”—has not left much of an impression on medieval scholarship. Both—his narrative
and his methodological endeavor—are far from being outdated. / R E P R E S E N T A T I O N S 106. Spring
2009 © The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734–6018, electronic ISSN 1533–855X, pages
102–17. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to
the University of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:10.1525/
102 rep.2009.106.1.102.
REP106_06 3/4/09 2:39 PM Page 103
Success
generation after its publication. Whether today’s scholars refer to the book
in line with the art historian Horst Bredekamp as a “continuous success,” or
in line with the medieval historian Josef Fleckenstein as an “erratic block,”
seems to depend on disciplinary affiliation (and perhaps national academic
culture).7 Fleckenstein stressed the book’s continuous failure to be inte-
grated into the discipline’s discussions, especially in the field for which it
was written—medieval political theory. To some extent, both evaluations
are correct; there are different success stories to tell. Bredekamp, the art
historian—an experiment-oriented specimen in his guild—talks about the
book’s “central idea,” which he identifies as “the coincidence of individual
and institutional body.”
One may wonder whether the two bodies are really the book’s central
idea, or whether they are just an arresting image that has distracted scholars
from the book’s systematic interest. The image of the two bodies does not
say much about what Kantorowicz was struggling with: the historical narra-
tive that he intended to seed in his readers’ minds. His concern was less
about the body than about the much less sexy “State.” The central image of
the doubled body was doubtless successful, but the book’s central concern
about the political language predating and preparing “the early modern
commonwealths” was not. The vast majority of authors referring in one way
or the other to The King’s Two Bodies has used the book more as a source of
inspiration than as a reference for a convincing narrative about constitu-
tional history or an exemplary method for the study of political theory.
No doubt The King’s Two Bodies (1957) belongs to the genre of oft-quoted
and often altered titles. It has begotten many children: The Queen’s Two Bodies
(Marie Axton, 1977), The King’s Simple Body (Le simple corps du roi; Alain
Boureau, 1988), The King’s Body (Sergio Bertelli, 1990), “The King’s One Body”
(David M. Gallo, 1992), “The King’s Many Bodies” (Des Königs viele Leiber; Gun-
ther Teubner, 1996), The Queen’s Body (Der Körper der Königin; Frank Fehren-
bach, 1996), and, of course, the famous “lesser body of the condemned man”
(Michel Foucault, 1975), expressly phrased “in homage to Kantorowicz.”8
Foucault’s homage to Kantorowicz in Surveiller et punir is generally perceived
as the main catalyst for the very belated spirited interest in The King’s Two
Bodies. Foucault’s prominence and the general career of the body in humani-
ties scholarship in recent decades have made this old, heavy, and learned
macrohistorical work of German Geistesgeschichte suddenly attractive. Today,
the book’s title is seeing its first grandchildren in works such as Kristin
Marek’s 2008 dissertation “The King’s Bodies” (Die Körper des Königs).
All of the authors who have borrowed their titles from Kantorowicz
were—as were many others—inspired by the appeal of the book’s ostensible
central image of the ruler’s twin or double figure, nature, person, or body.
The book enjoyed success in academic fields beyond classical medieval
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Concern
their own feet.” The book is—whomever it inspired for whatever subject—a
book about the conceptual emergence of the early modern “State.” The book
is on the Middle Ages, but its perspective clearly reaches beyond the Middle
Ages; it is “the problem of what has been called ‘The myth of the State.’”11
Admittedly, such programmatic statements in a book’s preface usually
do not determine the book’s appropriation by later readers, as they do not
necessarily relate what the author in fact has written about. But this book,
while meandering perilously through centuries, text types, and media,
never forgets to line up interpretations and fix its gaze on its early modern
reference point. Thus, consideration of its relevance today might for a
moment put aside the doubled body and instead focus on the relevance of
the book’s main concern—the conceptual prehistory of the early modern
“commonwealths” (or “States”). Though one might admit that the chronol-
ogy of the narrative remains somewhat muddy, and the lifetimes of the pro-
tagonists often do not fit into the scheme of consecutive intellectual eras,
the outline of Kantorowicz’s narrative is not as difficult to grasp as is some-
times asserted. He was wary enough to condense it in the chapter headings.
Roughly speaking, a theocentric Carolingian notion of kingship was dis-
placed by a Christocentric Ottonian and early Salian notion, which turned
around the time of Frederick II (died 1250) from a Christocentric to a legal
focus, and from a theory of kingship to a theory of government.12 Already
in the thirteenth century, a polity- or body-politic-centered model emerged
that shifted attention from the ruling person to the ruled collectives and
showed some of the main patterns of the later ideology of the early modern
“State.”
Kantorowicz mostly singled out the early modern “State” with an initial
capital letter and quotation marks. Because his book was meant to be about
the emergence of this capitalized modern institution in quotation marks, the
descriptive vocabulary for its antecedents was decisive. Though he was not
completely consistent in his nomenclature, Kantorowicz did quite con-
sciously struggle with his vocabulary for the political formations that predated
the “State.”13 What transformed a state into a “State” were attributions such as
“abstract,” “personified” or “autonomous,” “existing for its own sake,” and,
not least, “modern” or “early modern.” A tenth-century “philosophy of state”
was not meant to be associated with these attributes, and Kantorowicz’s
efforts to avoid alluding to medieval political formations as abstract, personi-
fied institutions are evident throughout the book. These efforts were evi-
dently a tightrope act, and sometimes he apparently felt the need for an
explicit warning. When, for instance, he interpreted the formula ratio status
in Henry of Ghent (thirteenth century) as foreshadowing the “reason of
state,” he warned in the same breath that for Henry, “status meant the com-
mon welfare and not the personified state.”14 Or he stressed the difficulty of
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State
not decrease but increase ritualism.17 Moreover, scholars now frequently point
to the limits of conceiving of Carolingians and Ottonians as early brothers of
the Trobrianders, Kabyles, or Tuareg.18 Thus, statehood and its emergence
return to the core of medievalists’ discussions.
What might Kantorowicz’s book on the changing political language in
the medieval non-“States” or pre-“States” from the Carolingians to the
Renaissance be good for? Will his explorations in pre-“State” constitutional
semantics at last be discussed in the field for which they were written? Is
there anything to be gained from rereading The King’s Two Bodies?
Some historians claim—in line with Kantorowicz—that for many cen-
turies the term regnum was an attribute of kingship, best translated as “kingly
power” or “being king” or “the realm of a king’s political reach.”19 The only
abstract, all-embracing entity that legitimized power and gave sense to a
king’s measures was the church; kingship was a function in the religious uni-
verse and regnum an attribute of this function. At some point in medieval his-
tory, regnum turned from a king’s attribute into an abstract, personified
institutional subject with kingship being an internal office of the abstract
actor regnum. Only this later use of the word regnum might appropriately be
translated as “Reich” or “empire.” A recent study of the twelfth-century Reich
observed first “attempts of abstraction” by the court of Frederick Barbarossa.
The court “started to conceive the Reich as an institution.” The suddenly fre-
quent use of formulas such as honor regni and honor imperii articulated the
court’s “feeling around for a new definition of regnum with the help of tradi-
tional terminology like honor. Whereas regnum had been conceived up to
then through persons, namely, the king or princes, a term like honor opened
up the possibility of attributing to regnum its own nature [Wesen], though one
still quite diffuse.”20 More research needs to be carried out for different
types of text, but such studies are likely to point to the moment of a broader
semantic change of regnum. Scattered expressions here and there in the vast
amount of material may be found in earlier texts since around the year 1000,
but for a long-term perspective in changing constitutional semantics such as
Kantorowicz’s, sparse early findings are less instructive than broad shifts in
the political apparatus. For early medieval texts, regnum might not be ade-
quately translated as “Reich”—that is, as an abstract institutional subject—
and similar hesitation might be warranted for imperium or res publica.
Some historians claim that an abstract, autonomous political sphere, a
Staatlichkeit, was actually conceived much earlier. They see an implicit theory
of “State” already at the Carolingian court, especially in court annals, and
thus tend to claim that the Carolingian or, more generally, early medieval
political system had been staatlich or a Staat.21 Another position argues that
the existence of an early medieval State/Staat does not necessarily imply an
early medieval theory of State/Staat. According to this position, we ought to
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actions. It should be noted that this discussion is not simply about a some-
what anachronistic translation of some words; it is about a fundamental issue
of interpretation: “Speaking of an early medieval Staat or Reich,” to quote
Johannes Fried, “conceals the conceptual conditions of intentional acting,”
because early medieval political acting is not placed in the conceptual
abstraction by which it was conditioned (church, creation) but displaced in a
not-yet-existent abstraction with a completely different rationality (Staat).24
As far as I can see, Kantorowicz does not play any role in these discussions:
he is as absent as he has been for the last fifty years. One might learn a lot by
taking his narrative into consideration.
Endeavor
Critics
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Evidence
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author Peter the Lombard, also much too late; (d) Anselm of Laon, also a
century too late as evidence; and (e) one anonymous text, wrongly attributed
to Bede the Venerable, which is hard to date.
The impressive footnote does not contain any evidence that could be
directly used for the interpretation of the tenth-century illumination. One
may take into consideration that Anselm of Laon or Peter the Lombard have
quoted from earlier authors, perhaps from florilegia. One may also assume
that an illustrator working in an intellectual center like the monastery of
Reichenau had some opportunity to be familiar with the passage in question.
But this is a calculation of probability, not evidence. Kantorowicz expressly
worked with this calculation when he assumed that references like Anselm’s
and Peter’s to the Augustinian exegesis of that psalm “can probably be
found in many other writings as well.” Today’s convenient research tools
allow us to see that this assumption was too optimistic. We can find the
eighth-century bishop Heterius of Osma, the ninth-century monk Smaragd,
and the tenth-century abbot Odo of Cluny referring to the Augustinian
phrase, but not many more. This is still sparse evidence for the fame of
Augustine’s image of Christ sitting in heaven with feet and limbs struggling
on earth. Up to the twelfth century, it seems, this passage from Augustine
was not repeated many times.
Again, Kantorowicz knew that it is difficult to find the notion of the gem-
ina persona in the Christocentric era, and he offered a quite unsatisfying
alternative for giving evidence: “The king could appear, at least potentially,
as a gemina persona.”41 Today students learn that not every line on a map is in
fact a used street, and that thoughts that were incompletely developed by
medieval authors were not necessarily meant to be logically completed by
later scholars. Undergraduates are taught that the logic of a medieval
author’s argument or metaphor had at the time to be sufficient for its pur-
pose, but it did not have to be complete, and that we follow false pursuits
when carrying on ideas that were incompletely developed. Yet this is what
today’s students must know—what has been learned from Pierre Bourdieu
and others; we cannot charge Kantorowicz for not having learned the
Bourdieu lesson. Geistesgeschichte in Kantorowicz’s days argued the same
way he did.
A final example: In the chapter on Frederick II, Kantorowicz wished to
find a visual document for the emergence of Iustitia in the royal self-definition.
Because he could not find a useful image depicting Frederick II, he drew on
Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Buon Governo.42 Few pictures corroborate his argu-
ment less than this one. Not only did Lorenzetti live much too late to pro-
vide an example of the era of law-centered kingship; his famous masterpiece
conceived the city’s rulership and its legitimation in a radically different way,
literally in opposition to medieval conceptions of kingship.
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Notes
I warmly thank Johannes Fried, for discussing this text with me, and Ginger A.
Diekmann, and Jean Day, for their assistance with language revision.
1. “George universe” refers to the “Georgekreis” around Stefan George; Karl
Löwith, Von Rom nach Sendai. Von Japan nach Amerika: Reisetagebuch 1936 und
1941, ed. Klaus Stichweh and Ulrich von Bülow, with an essay by Adolf Muschg
(Marbach, 2005), cf. 105: “Autofahrt nach Berkeley—Eucalyptusbäume, schön-
ster Blick über die Bay. Ich zu E. Kantorowicz, der sein Georgesches Reich inzwis-
chen säkularisiert hat und ‘irgendwie’ sagt. Likörbatterien in einer grotesken
Filmdiva-Wohnung. Huxleys Beschreibung.” Translation into English by the
author.
2. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theol-
ogy (Princeton, NJ, 1957); Ernst H. Kantorowicz, I due corpi del re: l’idea di
regalita nella teologia politica medievale (Turin, 1989); Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Les
deux corps du roi: Essai sur la théologie politique au moyen âge (Paris, 1989); Ernst H.
Kantorowicz, Die zwei Körper des Königs: Eine Studie zur politischen Theologie des
Mittelalters (Munich, 1990).
3. Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 354.
4. See Johannes Fried, “Ernst H. Kantorowicz and Postwar Historiography: Ger-
man and European Perspectives,” in Ernst Kantorowicz: Erträge der Doppeltagung
Princeton/Frankfurt, ed. Robert L. Benson and Johannes Fried (Stuttgart, 1997),
180–201. It may be sufficient here to refer to two exponents in the German dis-
cussion: Tilmann Struve, Die Entwicklung der organologischen Staatsauffassung im
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