ABSTRACT
By the early sixteenth century, the notion of the ruler, whether Pope, Emperor, King or other worldly prince, as the head of ‘his’ political entity was a well-established commonplace that co-existed alongside the older hierocratic and legal notions. The commonsense implication was that the ruler was an integral part of the body and therefore dependent on its general health. If the body died, the head (or, in the “fable” tradition, the belly) would perish with it. In the following two centuries this assumption was to change drastically. The assumption of the interdependence of all body politic members including the head of state gave way to new concepts that served the ideological needs of rulers who were able to make a bid for more absolute power. The metaphorical framing of these changes forms the topic of this chapter.1
