The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology

Kantorowicz was a historian of medieval political and intellectual history. He taught at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he published his masterpiece, The King’s Two Bodies, which explored medieval political theology and how theologians, historians and canonists in the Middle Ages understood the office and person of the king, as well as the idea of the kingdom, in corporeal and organological terms. This classic described the figure of the European monarch as a unique product of religious and legal traditions that eventually produced the notion of a “king” as simultaneously a person and an embodiment of the community of the realm.

The King has in him two Bodies, viz., a Body natural, and a Body politic. His Body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a Body mortal, subject to all infirmities that come by Nature or Accident, to the Imbecility of Infancy or old Age, and to the like Defects that happen to the natural Bodies of other People. But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the People, and the Management of the public weal, and this Body is utterly void of Infancy, and old Age, and other natural Defects and Imbecilities, which the Body natural is subject to, and for this Cause, what the King does in his Body politic cannot be invalidated or frustrated by any Disability in his natural Body.