The King's Two Bodies Today

Author(s): Bernhard Jussen

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Source: Representations, Vol. 106, No. 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 102-117
Published by: University of California Press
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REP106_06 3/4/09 2:39 PM Page 102

BERNHARD JUSSEN

The King’s Two Bodies Today

Somehow

In his diary “From Japan to America,” written in fall 1941,

the German philosopher Karl Löwith mentioned Ernst Kantorowicz in a
very brief and dry passage. The two immigrants, both victims of Nazi Ger-
many, met on March 8, 1941, only a few days after Löwith arrived in his new
host country from Japan. Löwith noted:
By car to Berkeley—Eucalyptus trees, tremendous view over the bay. I am going to
E. Kantorowicz, who has now secularized his George universe [sein Georgesches Reich]
and says “somehow.” Liqueur batteries in a grotesque film-diva’s residence. Huxley’s
description.1

“Secularization” and the logical connection “somehow”—this is what Löwith

observed in 1941. The philosopher’s catchwords provide a fairly suitable
approach to Kantorowicz’s late work, The King’s Two Bodies (1957), as well as
to the book’s value in today’s academic debates. “Secularization” (though
not exactly in Löwith’s sense) may be taken as a key term for the book’s main
thematic concern—the disentanglement of an autonomous institutional
subject called “State” out of the all-embracing political concept “Church.”
And “somehow” may be taken for the book’s methodological endeavor to
grasp the fluid and associative logic of semantic figurations that express
medieval political order before the “State.”
In the following pages I attempt to sketch the position of The King’s Two
Bodies in today’s medieval scholarship, five decades after its publication in the
United States and two decades after its translation into French, Italian, and
German.2 Four claims in particular are considered in this article: (1) The
book’s thematic concern is still on the agenda. (2) Of no less intense interest
is the book’s methodological endeavor in, as Kantorowicz once phrased it,
“what may perhaps be termed constitutional semantics.”3 This very tentative

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

proposal of an academic label is a first small hint of the problems Kantoro-

wicz had to cope with: the academic field he outlines in his book has been sys-
tematically theorized only by the generation following him—by Reinhard
Koselleck, Quentin Skinner, Jacques Guilhaumou, and others. Moreover,
only today’s scholars have the facilities needed to get from medieval texts the
kind of information that Kantorowicz wished to obtain, and to perform the
kind of studies in which Kantorowicz was interested. (3) Germanophone,
Francophone, and Anglophone medieval scholars may face different difficul-
ties in working with this book, since the academic nomenclature of its central
subject—constitutional semantics predating the “State”—poses major linguistic
problems. (4) Kantorowicz’s methodological interest in constitutional seman-
tics clashed with his academic training and skills as a historian of ideas, and this
clash may have caused the somewhat peculiar and often unacceptable empiri-
cal strategy of the book and the puzzlement of many of the book’s critics.
Fifty years after its first publication, an academic book may have assumed
any number of positions in academic life: as an unnoticed volume on the
shelves, as a noteworthy contribution to the intellectual history of a discipline,
as a paradigm for problems that fascinated scholars fifty years ago, as a classic
title with great prominence in prefaces to books but inciting little discussion in
the books themselves, as a book unnoticed at the moment of publication but
unexpectedly important decades later, or as a key work in debates that are still
lively fifty years later.
Kantorowicz’s book is all of these. It was noticed from the very begin-
ning. In some academic communities (such as the history of political ideas
and Verfassungsgeschichte in Germany), it occupies a rather silent position on
the shelves; in others (such as art history), some of the book’s ideas have
sown the seeds for intense discussions.4 The title, at least, has been famous
since the 1980s, but the book’s chances for prominence were always limited
by the strong effect of two other aspects of academic discussions of its
author: the attention paid to his early, politically dubious book Frederick the
Second (first published in German in 1927) and the broad interest in his
intellectual biography, which ranged from Weimar-hostile adherent of the
George circle to key figure in the intellectual climate of the Princeton Insti-
tute for Advanced Studies.5 American colleagues tend to assume that Nor-
man Cantor’s chapter “The Nazi Twins,” in his Inventing the Middle Ages, on
Percy Ernst Schramm and Kantorowicz, may be better known in the United
States than is Kantorowicz’s book on the king’s two bodies.6

Success

The book was used in medieval and early modern scholarship in

the late 1980s and translated into French, Italian, and German an entire

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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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history, particularly in experimental fields. It was read with a Foucauldian

perspective; it gave impetus to gender history; it inspired the reading of early
modern drama and of Hobbes’s Leviathan and, a bit closer to Kantorowicz’s
original concern, of art-historical studies on effigies and double-decker
tombs. It seeded fruitful discussions among media archaeologists; sociolo-
gists; and scholars of modern literature, philosophy, political science, and
cultural studies—the vast majority of whom were not medievalists.9 In short,
what endures in today’s debates is mainly an inspiration seeded by Kan-
torowicz’s central image of the doubled body.
So much for the success story. The other side of the coin is that in the
field for which it was written—medieval political theory or constitutional
history—traces of the book are sparse. Kantorowicz’s long-term narrative on
early Western constitutional history did not conquer the manuals and text-
books of medieval history or the established reference books on medieval
political theory; it hardly made inroads in the specialized literature, not to
mention the reading lists for seminars in medieval history. Moreover, his
methodological endeavor found interest only at (or beyond) the margins of
the discipline for which he was writing. A serious discussion of the book’s his-
torical narrative and empirical validity has not taken place.

Concern

In rough form, at least, Kantorowicz’s idea of the two bodies is

famous: He detected the “theory” or “tenet” of the king’s two bodies per-
fectly formulated in Tudor England and perfectly ritually performed in
early modern France, and he claimed these early modern phenomena to be
late expressions of what he thought to be at the core of medieval political
theology. Kantorowicz traced this sixteenth- and seventeenth-century the-
ory back to the Ottonians, the Carolingians, and even the very beginnings
of the Middle Ages. Traces of a Tudor tenet back through the Middle Ages
attracted his interest because the figure of the doubled body helped him to
understand the emergence of what he called “the idea of the virtual identity
of predecessor and successor,” or “the idea of the continuous personality.”10
But Kantorowicz did not collect all these traces of doubled bodies
because they were interesting in themselves. The famous king’s doubled body
is solely “a unifying principle easing the assemblage and selection of facts as
well as their synthesis.” It is the structuring element and the suitable material
to treat the book’s systematic interest. All specific subjects in the book—the
doubled body, fiscus, patria, the metaphor of the wedding ring, and others—
are “ciphers” of what Kantorowicz desired to grasp, “ciphers” for “political
creeds such as they were understood in their initial stage and at a time when
they served as a vehicle for putting the early modern commonwealths on

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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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labeling these medieval non-”States” by using ponderous and uncommon

phrases such as “political aggregates.”15
If Anglophone medievalists have much less trouble than their Ger-
manophone colleagues in describing medieval political aggregates, it is
probably not because they have found a better solution to the question, but
because the English language tends to obscure the problematic of an aca-
demic terminology appropriate for medieval constitutional history. The
terms Kantorowicz used (apart from kingdom) to refer to the aggregates
before the “State” all have, and are meant to have for his purpose, a number
of different meanings: “state,” “realm,” or “commonwealth.” They do not
automatically imply, as does the German term Staat, an abstract, personified
institutional subject. Readers of the German translation find every “state” and
“commonwealth” turned into a Staat; even the Carolingian “state within the
church” is translated as “Staat innerhalb der Kirche.”16 Every “realm” is turned
into a Reich, which also unavoidably implies an abstract, personified institu-
tion, where sometimes more ruler-focused translations, such as Herrschafts-
raum, would surely have been more apt.

State

Is there a place in current scholarship for this kind of fifty-year-old,

scrupulous approach to the long history of constitutional semantics predat-
ing and preparing for the early modern “State”? For some decades, medieval
scholars showed little interest in statehood. Especially with respect to early
medieval societies, they made significant progress borrowing their questions,
themes, and methodological apparatus from anthropology. For at least two
generations, medieval scholarship was mainly about “persons in groups” and
“leadership”; about “face-to-face societies,” and sometimes expressly “societies
without a state.” Academic categories such as “ritual,” “purity and danger,”
“conflict,” “gift exchange,” “enactment,” “symbolic communication,” “public
performance,” “kinship systems,” and “taboo” were honed with examples from
anthropology—from the Polynesian Trobrianders, the Algerian Kabyles, the
Balinese cockfights, or the Tuareg conception of honor. The analogy between
these societies and early medieval ones was plausible at the time, given, for
example, the assumption that political ritualism was the dominant organiza-
tional mode in societies with limited institutional capacities—that is, in soci-
eties “without a state.” This period of medieval scholarship was not a good
time for a book like Kantorowicz’s, which treated the constitutional history of
the medieval West.
In recent years, however, the scholarly perspective has changed; it now
tends toward the hypothesis that higher degrees of political institutionaliza-
tion and a proliferation of interpretational models and scopes of action do

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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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concede to the Carolingian contemporaries a “knowledge without concept,”

an implicit knowledge that did not lead to something like theories. The exe-
gesis of a term like regnum thus is claimed to be quite useless.22 Kantorowicz,
I suspect, would have disagreed with this position and would have pled for
his constitutional semantics approach. Scholars who assume a “knowledge
without concept” do not have to find an explicit concept, but they do need
to find an implicit knowledge. This task is much harder, and the usual way to
accomplish it is—since the days of “history of mentalities”—to study linguis-
tic patterns with sociolinguistic tools. How else could implicit knowledge be
made visible? This is the field of semantic research, or of what, according to
Kantorowicz, “may perhaps be termed constitutional semantics.”
Scholars wishing to find a Carolingian and an Ottonian State/Staat also
argue that we should not conceive of this era as conceptually less capable
than our own: the Carolingians managed to govern a huge area and should
not be seen on the level of the African or Polynesian tribal societies that have
inspired medievalists in past decades. This warning, however, does not cap-
ture the problematic. The discussion (ours as well as Kantorowicz’s) is not
about what early medieval rulers were already able to conceive and what they
could not yet understand. It is about whether their—doubtless elaborate—
notions of society, power, and legitimation differ radically or only slightly
from ours. Kantorowicz’s answer is that they differ radically, for the entirety
(or the reference point) that legitimated all social difference and power,
that endowed all political measures with plausibility, was never something
other than the church, christianitas, and God’s will in creation. This refer-
ence point was, it is hardly necessary to mention, not less complex than later
conceptions, but it was fundamentally different. This difference makes it
necessary to translate words like regnum, “empire,” and “realm” as functions
of ecclesia rather than institutional subjects in themselves, and as attributes of
the ruler instead of an entirety that embraces the ruler and endows him with
legitimacy.
Thus, the history to be narrated is not about a slowly emerging political
theory of abstract institutionality throughout the Middle Ages. It is about the
transformation from one complex theory of abstract institutionality (with
the church at its center) to another (with the state at its center). Both theo-
ries were doubtless complex and explicit, and both doubtlessly conceived
the political entirety that endowed a king with legitimacy and his actions
with plausibility as an abstract personified institution.
These discussions about when and how statehood emerged in Western
Europe are currently very lively, and not just among German-speaking
medievalists.23 There is disagreement about how kings and their writing
entourages conceived the political entirety from which kings derived their
legitimation and which served as a reference for making sense of their

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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

Kantorowicz obviously believed that he could find the prehistory

of the “State” in the linguistic and metaphorical patterns of the centuries
before the “State.” All patterns discussed in The King’s Two Bodies are bits of
evidence for the great transformation from “political aggregates” that were
imaginable only as a function of the religious universe to aggregates inde-
pendent of religion.
Kantorowicz’s search for political creeds predating and preparing for
the early modern commonwealths was linguistic. He talked about “political
language” and “concepts”; about “formulas,” “patterns,” and “texture”; about
“notions” and their “significance”; about the “peculiar ring” or “undertone” of
“nomenclature” and “terminology”; about “idioms” or “ciphers.” He focused
on the “slight variation,” the “seemingly insignificant shift,” and the way it
“penetrated” collective notions. He often used formulas like “language and
thought” or “language and theology,” as if the book were about the relation
between these two factors. And he concentrated on reservoirs of potentially
politicized terminology, such as liturgy in the tenth and eleventh centuries
and legal texts since the late twelfth century.

Critics

The medieval historian Jean-Philippe Genet (born some years

after Kantorowicz reached the United States), translator of The King’s Two
Bodies into French, spoke for many medieval scholars when he criticized
Kantorowicz for not considering the textual and extratextual context of what
he quotes and analyzes.25 Indeed, Kantorowicz liked to jump from genre to
genre, from medium to medium, bounding across centuries, moving about
societies and areas all over Western—and sometimes even Byzantine—
Europe. To escape this kind of criticism, Kantorowicz’s book depends on the

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plausibility of methods that are explicitly noncontextual. Thus, scholars

wishing to defend Kantorowicz describe his strategy as a “poetological, non-
contextual approach.” According to Anselm Haverkamp, Kantorowicz found
“the poetical moment in the legal/constitutional texts, and the constitutional
moments in the poetical ones.”26 Others perceive his technique as an “extraor-
dinary early discourse-analytical approach”; praise it as a “text-archaeological”
method; or call him a “new historicist” avant la lettre.27 In short, they claim
that Kantorowicz was far ahead of his time, having been an early archaeolo-
gist, a historian of discourses, who dug out basic patterns of medieval political
semantics in the textual structure of a vast number of very different texts.
Indeed, if this reading is acceptable, if Kantorowicz was interested in finding
political discourses engraved in semantic figurations, the criticism of neglect-
ing contexts and literary genres would be much less grave. Semantic figura-
tions, once internalized by medieval actors and authors, hardly respected the
boundaries of a text genre, a medium, or a social group.
It is easy enough to find evidence in the book for something like an
archaeological or discourse-analytical interest (avant la lettre), such as Kan-
torowicz’s interest in “shifts in late medieval nomenclature, often hardly
perceptible and yet very telling, [that] were on the surface symptoms of
evolutions in far deeper strata of Western religious sentiments.”28 Today one
would no longer conceive of nomenclature as a phenomenon on the sur-
face, but grosso modo Kantorowicz’s formulations are only slightly different
from today’s expressions of an interest in semantic figurations, discourses, or
mental orientations. However, on the basis of this acceptance, a few ques-
tions become unavoidable. First, did he succeed in digging out long-term
discourses that can be described as constitutional semantics predating the
“State”? To answer this question, one would need to seriously discuss his nar-
rative and countercheck by means of today’s facilities whether the semantic
patterns he claimed to be common at a given time were in fact so. This work
still needs to be done. Second, is his discourse-oriented research acceptable
according to today’s standards? If it is not acceptable, are his methodological
weaknesses mendable, and are his results useful for the current debates?
The last section of this article offers a glimpse of his empirical strategies.

Evidence

Some brief examples of Kantorowicz’s research strategy may

finally point to the weaknesses of The King’s Two Bodies; weaknesses that
might be ameliorated with today’s research facilities, but that might also
challenge his narrative. For example, one of Kantorowicz’s key sources is
the eleventh-century so-called Norman Anonymous. We do not know who

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this author was or where he wrote. No medieval author ever quoted or

referred to him, and his ideas are quite remote from those of his fellow
authors. Why does Kantorowicz need this strange text? It discusses, in Kan-
torowicz’s words, “what later would be defined as persona mixta, the ‘mixed
person,’ in which various capacities or strata concurred.”29 This sentence
sounds as if Kantorowicz intended to analyze an idea before it was institu-
tionalized in a specific verbal configuration (“what later would be defined
as persona mixta”), a concept avant la lettre. This approach would have been
interesting, but it took Kantorowicz only a few sentences to forget that the
concept did not yet exist and to talk about “the Norman Anonymus on the
persona mixta.”30 It is this kind of fuzziness that makes the book’s narrative
somewhat hard to follow—the slight unsharpness hidden behind its literary
style and the unclear relations with what has come before and what after.
Kantorowicz generalized the ideas of a radical, anonymous, completely
ignored author. For an archaeology of discourse or of semantic patterns, this
text is hardly useful. Beyond this single text, the doubled or twinned person
of the king is hard to locate in that period.31 Kantorowicz was aware of this
problem, and he expressly pointed to it: “In his tractates,” Kantorowicz wrote
about the anonymous author, “he actually sums up the political ideas of the
tenth and eleventh centuries. But like every bard who glorifies a bygone age,
he overlabors and overstresses past ideals,” and does so in “the most extreme
form”; he was a “mirror that magnifies and thereby slightly distorts.”32 Kan-
torowicz actually expressed quite clearly what a reviewer of the German
translation blamed him for having concealed: “Picking his precious orchids
at the edge of the mountains, he should have expressed somewhere along
the line that the wide mountain grassland is covered with simple grass.”33
But, to be sure, even if the critics were wrong on that point, there are enough
inconsistencies in the narrative that one might criticize. Although Kantoro-
wicz declared this the anonymous polemic of an extreme and over-exaggerat-
ing romantic bard from a lost time, he claimed the bard as his foremost
example for demonstrating the influence of the coronation ordines on lan-
guage and thought.34 A single and extreme text can hardly be the foremost
example of a collective linguistic habit.
In another chapter, he claims eleventh-century Ivo of Chartres as evi-
dence for his interpretation. He found useful that, according to Ivo, a
bishop habet duos status (“has two positions”)—one as bishop and one as
count.35 This statement may be interesting for some narratives, but not for
Kantorowicz’s. Not everything that has two sides or aspects or—as in the text
of Ivo of Chartres—two functions or positions, fits into a conceptual history
of the doubled body, twin figure, or persona mixta.
Another example: Kantorowicz claimed to have found “the general
problem of the king’s two bodies in its early medieval setting” in a sermon

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wrongly attributed to John Chrysostom, a quite popular sermon on St.

Matthew throughout the Middle Ages. The sermon tells of the ass carrying
Christ on Palm Sunday and being returned to the owner afterwards. As the
sermon relates (in Kantorowicz’s translation), “of that animal, Christ had
needed not the visible, but the intelligible nature; that is, not the flesh, but
the idea [ratio]. Hence the flesh was returned, but the idea was retained
[caro remissa est, ratio autem retenta est].” One can hardly deny that the sermon
reflects upon what is left when the flesh is gone. The flesh/idea dichotomy
separates the ass’s natural body from its function in salvific history. But once
again it looks as if everything that has two sides, parts, or functions is inte-
grated into the narrative of The King’s Two Bodies: the two positions of a bishop
(Ivo of Chartres), and the ass with a “visible” and an “intelligible nature,” with
caro and ratio, flesh and idea. If Kantorowicz takes this dichotomy as “the gen-
eral problem of the King’s Two Bodies in its early medieval setting,” he inte-
grates in a very broad sense an intellectual precondition into his narrative:
the “general” readiness to distinguish between a temporary and an infinite
aspect of a creature or person.36
The famous tenth-century Apotheosis of Otto III in the Aachen Gospels,
another key example for Kantorowicz, shares some of the problems of the
Norman Anonymous text. The iconography—the emperor sitting in the
Mandorla right in the place of Christ—is singular and, one might say,
extreme.37 Again, Kantorowicz was aware of the singularity and tried to gloss
over it by claiming that “a priori it would appear unlikely that the master of
the Aachen Gospels should have been inspired by other than conventional
material for his unconventional image.”38 In plain language: this completely
unconventional and singular image must have had—“a priori”—a conven-
tional basis and thus can be used as an example. This logic is hardly accept-
able. As proof of the conventional basis of the image, Kantorowicz refers to
St. Augustine’s sermon on Psalm 91, in which Augustine exclaims, “Oh
Christ, who sittest in heaven on the right side of the father, but art with thy
feet and thy limbs struggling on earth.”39 There is no doubt that the late
tenth-century picture and the early fifth-century text have something in
common. Crucial for a discourse-oriented perspective is whether Kantorow-
icz’s attempt to close the gap between the fifth-century author and the tenth-
century illuminator is convincing: “The Augustinian exegesis of that psalm
was repeated many times and was generally known.”40 As so often, he
attached one of the long, learned footnotes for which he is still famous. It is
worthwhile to look more closely at the five pieces of evidence meant to show
that the tenth-century illuminator was referring to common knowledge of
Augustinian exegesis: (a) the Canterbury Gospel, written in the twelfth cen-
tury, which is more than a century too late; (b) the thirteenth-century Glossa
Ordinaria, which are much too late as evidence; (c) the twelfth-century

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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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These examples of Kantorowicz’s empirical strategy are perhaps sufficient

to conclude by way of summary: Kantorowicz may have been interested in
something quite similar to today’s discourse-analytical perspectives. But he
was far from practicing an empirical strategy to grasp such discourse. It seems
as though he was caught in the techniques he had learned for writing the his-
tory of ideas when his interests shifted and broke fresh ground. His empirical
tools and his methodological interests were not, it seems, congruent. Yet,
even so, he did set off to break fresh ground. Today his interest in linguistic
formations has become an institutionalized academic field called historical
semantics among Germanophone and conceptual history among Anglophone
historians. In his time it was not institutionalized. Written long before the
impulses of Reinhard Koselleck or Quentin Skinner became productive
among historians, The King’s Two Bodies may be called a pioneering work. Kan-
torowicz’s narrative is still there to be discussed; the curiosity in political
semantics predating the “State” is as fresh as it was in his day. Today’s tools
give us the opportunity to perform the explorations in medieval constitu-
tional semantics that he proposed. This pursuit would help a good deal in the
current debates about early medieval Staat and Staatlichkeit.

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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REP106_06 3/4/09 2:39 PM Page 116

Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1978); Jürgen Miethke, Politiktheorie im Mittelalter: Von

Thomas von Aquin bis Wilhelm von Ockham (Tübingen, 2008).
5. For an overview, see Benson and Fried, Ernst Kantorowicz: Erträge der Doppelta-
gung Princeton/Frankfurt.
6. Norman F. Cantor, “The Nazi Twins: Percy Ernst Schramm and Ernst Hartwig
Kantorowicz,” in Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great
Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1991), 79–117.
7. Horst Bredekamp, “Politische Zeit: Die zwei Körper des Königs von Thomas
Hobbes’ Leviathan,” in Geschichtskörper: Zur Aktualität von Ernst H. Kantorowicz,
ed. Wolfgang Ernst and Cornelia Vismann (Munich, 1998), 105–18, esp. 105;
Josef Fleckenstein, “Geleitwort,” in Kantorowicz, Die zwei Körper des Königs, 9–18,
esp. 17.
8. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris, 1975).
9. Exemplary are the contributions in Ernst and Vismann, Geschichtskörper.
10. Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 402.
11. All quotations in this paragraph: ibid., xviii–xix.
12. On the theocentric Carolingian notion of kingship, see ibid., 77: “The Carolin-
gian concept of a David-like kingship was decisively theocratic”; this theocen-
tric era did not get its own chapter in the book.
13. There are some moments of inattentiveness in the book; for example, Kan-
torowicz twice talks about relations “between Church and State” without keep-
ing up his orthographic habit (see ibid., 193), but in general his strategy is
clear.
14. Ibid., 257 n. 196 (a reference to Gaines Post).
15. Ibid., 193; see also 210, 211.
16. Kantorowicz, Die zwei Körper des Königs, 219 n. 45.
17. Frank Rexroth, “Tyrannen und Taugenichtse: Beobachtungen zur Ritualität
europäischer Königsabsetzungen im späten Mittelalter,” Historische Zeitschrift
278 (2004): 27–55; Frank Rexroth, “Um 1399: Wie man einen König absetzte,”
in Die Macht des Königs: Herrschaft in Europa vom Frühmittelalter bis in die Neuzeit,
ed. Bernhard Jussen (Munich, 2005): 241–54, esp. 245.
18. Patrick Geary, “Gift Exchange and Social Science Modelling: The Limitations
of a Construct,” in Negotiating the Gift: Pre-modern Figurations of Exchange, ed. Gadi
Algazi, Valentin Groebner, and Bernhard Jussen (Göttingen, 2003), 129–40;
Barbara Rosenwein, “Francia and Polynesia: Rethinking Anthropological
Approaches,” in ibid., 361–79; Walter Pohl, “Staat und Herrschaft im Mittelal-
ter: Überlegungen zum Forschungsstand,” in Staat im frühen Mittelalter, ed. Stu-
art Airlie, Walter Pohl, and Helmut Reimitz (Vienna, 2006), 9–38.
19. Concise version: Johannes Fried, “Um 900: Warum es das Reich der Franken
nicht gegeben hat,” in Jussen, Die Macht des Königs, 83–89; an earlier, slightly
different version: Johannes Fried, “Gens und regnum: Wahrnehmungs- und
Deutungskategorien politischen Wandels im früheren Mittelalter; Bemerkun-
gen zur doppelten Theoriebindung des Historikers,” in Sozialer Wandel im Mitte-
lalter: Wahrnehmungsformen, Erklärungsmuster, Regelungsmechanismen, ed. Jürgen
Miethke and Klaus Schreiner (Sigmaringen, 1994), 74–104.
20. Stefan Weinfurter, “Um 1157: Wie das Reich heilig wurde,” in Jussen, Die Macht
des Königs, 190–204, esp. 198.
21. Most recently (with references to older literature), see the contributions in Air-
lie, Pohl, and Reimitz, Staat im frühen Mittelalter. The proceedings of a large

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international conference in Vienna in March 2007 on the same subject are

about to be published: Europäische Staatlichkeit im frühen Mittelalter, ed. Walter
Pohl and Veronika Wieser (forthcoming).
22. This is the position of Pohl in “Staat und Herrschaft im Mittelalter.”
23. See Airlie, Pohl, and Reimitz; Fried, Staat im frühen Mittelalter; Fried, “Um 900:
Warum es das Reich der Franken nicht gegeben hat”; Weinfurter, “Um 1157:
Wie das Reich heilig wurde.”
24. Fried, “Um 900: Warum es das Reich der Franken nicht gegeben hat,” 85.
25. Jean-Phillippe Genet, “Kantorowicz and The King’s Two Bodies,” in Benson and
Fried, Ernst Kantorowicz, 265–73.
26. Anselm Haverkamp, “Stranger than Paradise: Dantes irdisches Paradies als
Antidot politischer Theologie,” in Ernst and Vismann, Geschichtskörper, 93–103,
esp. 96.
27. Kristin Marek, Die Körper des Königs: Die Bildkultur der Effigies (forthcoming).
Wolfgang Ernst, “Kantorowicz: New Historicism avant la lettre?” in Ernst and
Vismann, Geschichtskörper, 187–205.
28. Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 93.
29. Ibid., 43. 30. Ibid., 44 n. 5.
31. See Claudius Sieber-Lehmann, “Um 1079: Warum es für das Verhältnis von
Papst und Kaiser kein erfolgreiches Denkmodell gab,” in Jussen, Die Macht des
Königs, 150–64.
32. Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 60–61.
33. Horst Fuhrmann, “Die Heimholung des Ernst Kantorowicz: ‘The King’s Two
Bodies,’ 1957 in den USA erschienen, endlich auf deutsch,” Die Zeit, March 22,
1991 (no. 13): 49.
34. Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 98 n. 8.
35. Ibid., 44. 36. Ibid., 84.
37. For a detailed analysis of this image, see Johannes Fried, Otto III. und Boleslaw
Chrobry. Das Widmungsbild des Aachener Evangeliars, der “Akt von Gnesen” und das
frühe polnische und ungarische Königtum, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart, 2001).
38. Ibid., 71. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 72.
41. Ibid., 89. 42. Ibid., 112.

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