ABSTRACT
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conclusions from it – and of creative thinking; the work connects art history, literature, legal records and historical documents together in innovative and revealing ways across more than 800 years of history.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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
section 1|20 pages
Influences
module 1|5 pages
The Author and the Historical Context
module 2|5 pages
Academic Context
module 3|5 pages
The Problem
module 4|4 pages
The Author’s Contribution
section 2|20 pages
Ideas
module 5|5 pages
Main Ideas
module 6|5 pages
Secondary Ideas
module 7|5 pages
Achievement
module 8|4 pages
Place in the Author’s Work
section 3|21 pages
Impact
module 9|5 pages
The First Responses
module 10|5 pages
The Evolving Debate
module 11|5 pages
Impact and Influence Today
module 12|5 pages
Where Next?