ABSTRACT
The ruler’s body – its care and comfort, adornment and presentation, safety and security – must always be at the centre of the state’s concerns. Nowhere is this more true than in a personal monarchy, in which the sovereign’s decisions and popularity are determinative. Historians have long been aware of the distinction between the sovereign’s sacred, legal and constitutional body and his corporeal one, thanks in large part to the classic work of Ernst Kantorowicz, but most of the immediately ensuing research concentrated on the former. Actual, physical royal bodies were for many years left to popular historians, romance novelists and gossip columnists, part of a broad neglect of courts by academic scholars. Scholarly study of the court has taken off in the last few decades, as has the study of the body generally; but it is only in recent years that academics have begun to scrutinise the flesh and blood at the centre of the early modern state. 2
