ABSTRACT
Being nurtured in a highly symbolic culture, Latin medieval political theology could not work without some rhetorical fictions, what Ernst Kantorowicz called “metaphors of perfection”. There is every reason to consider that the political metaphor of Lady Wisdom as both a sign of God's grace and a dispenser of royal virtues was a particularly powerful one in the medieval narratives of kingship from the twelfth-century onwards. Wilhelm Berges, the German scholar who pioneered scholarship on medieval mirrors of princes, coined the concept “Ideal of the wise king” in order to define a topos of medieval political thought he had often come across. He was the first to view the relationship between the twelfth-century Renaissance court culture and the courtly ideal of wise kingship as something intelligible. Alexander Murray has aptly analyzed the discourse on knowledge and power of the twelfth-century Renaissance apologists of learning, reaching the conclusion that they elaborated a systematic theory on the cultural power of monarchy.
