Author: Ernst H. KantorowiczPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 568
Book Description
The King's Two Bodies
Author: Ernst KantorowiczPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400880785
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 633
Book Description
Originally published in 1957, this classic work has guided generations of scholars through the arcane mysteries of medieval political theology. Throughout history, the notion of two bodies has permitted the postmortem continuity of monarch and monarchy, as epitomized by the statement, “The king is dead. Long live the king.” In The King’s Two Bodies, Ernst Kantorowicz traces the historical dilemma posed by the “King’s two bodies”—the body natural and the body politic—back to the Middle Ages. The king’s natural body has physical attributes, suffers, and dies, as do all humans; however the king’s spiritual body transcends the earth and serves as a symbol of his office as majesty with the divine right to rule. Bringing together liturgical works, images, and polemical material, Kantorowicz demonstrates how early modern Western monarchies gradually began to develop a political theology. Featuring a new introduction and preface, The King’s Two Bodies is a subtle history of how commonwealths developed symbolic means for establishing their sovereignty and, with such means, began to establish early forms of the nation-state.
An Analysis of Ernst H. Kantorwicz's The King's Two Bodies
Author: Simon ThomsonPublisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1351353209
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 81
Book Description
Few historians trace grand themes across many centuries and places, but Ernst Kantorowicz's great work on the symbolic powers of kingship is a fine example of what can happen when they do. The King's Two Bodies is at once a superb example of the critical thinking skill of evaluation – assessing huge quantities of evidence, both written and visual, and drawing sound comparative conclusions from it – and of creative thinking; the work connects art history, literature, legal records and historical documents together in innovative and revealing ways across more than 800 years of history. Kantorowicz's key conclusions (that history is at root about ideas, that these ideas power institutions, and that both are commonly expressed and understood through symbols) have had a profound impact on several different disciplines, and even underpin many works of popular fiction – not least The DaVinci Code. And they were all made possible by fresh evaluation of evidence that other historians had ignored, or could not see the significance of.
Power in Modernity
Author: Isaac Ariail ReedPublisher:
ISBN: 022668945X
Category : Civilization, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 283
Book Description
"Isaac Reed's Power in Modernity aims to be a major contribution to social theory. It is a bold and innovative theoretical reimagining of power. Drawing on an eclectic range of ideas from across the humanities and social sciences, Reed rethinks the fundamentals of sociological theorizing of power-upsetting canonical traditions and remaking them with insights from poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies. First, Reed conceptualizes power as having three aspects: relational, discursive, and performative. He explores these aspects in relation to three different kinds of social actors-rector, agent, and other-and their connections. In essence, Reed brings power in the actions of individuals into relation with a wide range of institutional circumstances of power while neatly finessing the outmoded agency/structure binary. The result is a framework for the analysis of power that allows us to see both its sometimes fragile and precarious character, as well as its more typical stability and durability. We also get a window onto the episodic performances of power and how they institutionalize or unravel social orders. Power in Modernity is sure to be of interest to political sociologists and social theorists especially, and it will serve sociologists and other social scientists well who are interested in how power operates across many different social situations"--
Ernst Kantorowicz
Author: Robert E. LernerPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691183023
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 418
Book Description
The first complete biography of an influential historian whose dramatic life intersected with many great events and thinkers of the twentieth century This is the first complete biography of Ernst Kantorowicz (1895–1963), an influential German-American medieval historian whose colorful life intersected with many of the great events and thinkers of his time. Born into a wealthy Prussian-Jewish family, he fought in World War I—earning an Iron Cross and an Iron Crescent—before being sent home following an affair with a general’s mistress. Though he was an ardent German nationalist during the Weimar period, after the Nazis came to power he bravely spoke out against the regime before an overflowing crowd in Frankfurt. He narrowly avoided arrest after Kristallnacht, fleeing to England and then the United States, where he joined the faculty at Berkeley, only to be fired in 1950 for refusing to sign an anticommunist “loyalty oath.” From there, he “fell up the ladder” to Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, where he wrote his masterwork, The King’s Two Bodies. Drawing on many new sources, including numerous interviews and unpublished letters, Robert E. Lerner tells the story of a major intellectual whose life and times were as fascinating as his work.
The King’s Three Bodies
Author: Burkhard SchnepelPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000386945
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214
Book Description
This collection of essays deals with the rituals of kingship and royalty in India, Africa and Europe from the social anthropological and ethnohistorical points of view. It discusses the dialectical entanglements of rituals conducted for and by kings (including, ‘little kings’ and ‘jungle kings’) with the wider social, political, cultural, historical, religious and economic contexts in which they were embedded. Part I begins with a triangular comparison of kingship among the Shilluks of East Africa, the Gajapatis of eastern India and kings in Renaissance France. The essay entitled the ‘King’s Three Bodies’ makes use of Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s classical study, The King’s Two Bodies in medieval political theology and extends it, not only in terms of the numbers of bodies that are found to be significant, but also theoretically. Another significant essay in this part looks at the unexpected but significant theoretical impact of social anthropological studies of acephalous, segmentary lineage societies in Africa on Indian historiography. The second part of this volume consists of three chapters dealing with the royal patronage of tribal and Hindu goddesses in Eastern India, while the third part presents studies on sleeping (and dreaming) kings and on the power of dead kings, a discussion of A.M. Hocart’s dictum that the first kings must have been dead kings. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
The Royal Remains
Author: Eric L. SantnerPublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226735346
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 286
Book Description
"The king is dead. Long live the king!" In early modern Europe, the king's body was literally sovereign—and the right to rule was immediately transferrable to the next monarch in line upon the king's death. In The Royal Remains, Eric L. Santner argues that the "carnal" dimension of the structures and dynamics of sovereignty hasn't disappeared from politics. Instead, it migrated to a new location—the life of the people—where something royal continues to linger in the way we obsessively track and measure the vicissitudes of our flesh. Santner demonstrates the ways in which democratic societies have continued many of the rituals and practices associated with kingship in displaced, distorted, and usually, unrecognizable forms. He proposes that those strange mental activities Freud first lumped under the category of the unconscious—which often manifest themselves in peculiar physical ways—are really the uncanny second life of these "royal remains," now animated in the body politic of modern neurotic subjects. Pairing Freud with Kafka, Carl Schmitt with Hugo von Hofmannsthal,and Ernst Kantorowicz with Rainer Maria Rilke, Santner generates brilliant readings of multiple texts and traditions of thought en route to reconsidering the sovereign imaginary. Ultimately, The Royal Remains locates much of modernity—from biopolitical controversies to modernist literary experiments—in this transition from subjecthood to secular citizenship. This major new work will make a bold and original contribution to discussions of politics, psychoanalysis, and modern art and literature.
Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran
Author: İlker Evrim BinbaşPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107054249
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365
Book Description
Discusses the importance of informal intellectual networks and the formation of the republic of letters in Islamic history. The book focuses on the fifteenth century Timurid, Ottoman, and Mamluk empires, and traces the connections between intellectuals in these three early modern Islamic polities.
Premodern Rulership and Contemporary Political Power
Author: Karolina Anna MroziewiczPublisher:
ISBN: 9789462983311
Category : Kings and rulers
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
This book offers thirteen case studies from premodern and contemporary Europe that demonstrate the process through which political corporations-bodies politic-were and continue to be constructed and challenged.
The Body of the Queen
Author: Regina SchultePublisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845451219
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 382
Book Description
"Inspired by existential thought, but using ethnographic methods, Michael Jackson explores a variety of contemporary topics, including 9/11, episodes from the war in Sierra Leone and its aftermath, the marginalization of indigenous Australians, the application of new technologies, mundane forms of ritualization, the magical use of language, the sociality of violence, the prose of suffering, and the discourse of human rights. Throughout this compelling work, Jackson demonstrates that existentialism, far from being a philosophy of individual being, enables us to explore issues of social existence and coexistence in new ways, and to theorise events as the sites of a dynamic interplay between the finite possibilities of the situations in which human beings find themselves and the capacities they possess for creating viable forms of social life."--BOOK JACKET.
