5 Sovereign Body and Sacred Body
5.1. When Ernst Kantorowicz published The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology in the United States at the end of the 1950s, the book was received with great favor not only by medievalists but also and above all by historians of the modern age and scholars of political science and the theory of the state. The work was without doubt a masterpiece of its kind, and the notion that it advanced of a “mystical” or “political body” of the sovereign certainly constituted (as Kantorowicz’s most brilliant pupil, R. E. Giesey, observed years later) a “milestone in the history of the development of the modern state” (Giesey, Cérémonial, p. 9). Such unanimous favor in such a delicate area ought, however, to provoke some reflection.