Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Introduction: Fifty Years of The King's Two Bodies

Introduction: Fifty Years of The King's Two Bodies S T E P H E N G R E E N B L AT T Three of the four essays assembled in this special forum were originally presented at a panel held at the Renaissance Society of America's annual meeting in 2007 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. The fact that Kantorowicz's dense tome, much of which burrows into the theological and legal arcana of the early Middle Ages, should claim such attention, at the conference or in the pages of Representations, needs a word of explanation. To be sure, the book is famous by title and reputation, and yet, as Bernhard Jussen observes in his essay, medieval scholars (including Jussen himself) have been exceedingly wary of its method and its conclusions, while Renaissance scholars rarely know more than the opening chapters, some 34 pages out of the 506 that constitute its learned heft. The first of those chapters, "The Problem: Plowden's Reports," would not, as Lorna Hutson observes in passing, satisfy a legal historian seriously concerned with carefully reading Plowden in his institutional and intellectual contexts, while the second, "Shakespeare: King http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Representations University of California Press

Introduction: Fifty Years of The King's Two Bodies

Greenblatt, Stephen
Representations , Volume 106 – Apr 1, 2009
Download PDF
4 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/university-of-california-press/introduction-fifty-years-of-the-king-s-two-bodies-J9JtLHfBBO

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
University of California Press
Copyright
Copyright © by the University of California Press
ISSN
0734-6018
eISSN
1533-855X
DOI
10.1525/rep.2009.106.1.63
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

S T E P H E N G R E E N B L AT T Three of the four essays assembled in this special forum were originally presented at a panel held at the Renaissance Society of America's annual meeting in 2007 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. The fact that Kantorowicz's dense tome, much of which burrows into the theological and legal arcana of the early Middle Ages, should claim such attention, at the conference or in the pages of Representations, needs a word of explanation. To be sure, the book is famous by title and reputation, and yet, as Bernhard Jussen observes in his essay, medieval scholars (including Jussen himself) have been exceedingly wary of its method and its conclusions, while Renaissance scholars rarely know more than the opening chapters, some 34 pages out of the 506 that constitute its learned heft. The first of those chapters, "The Problem: Plowden's Reports," would not, as Lorna Hutson observes in passing, satisfy a legal historian seriously concerned with carefully reading Plowden in his institutional and intellectual contexts, while the second, "Shakespeare: King

Journal

Representations – University of California Press

Published: Apr 1, 2009

There are no references for this article.