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THE INFLUENCE OF EARLY MODERN THEORIES OF GOVERNANCE exhorting subjects to obey their king’s wishes as they obey God and never to commit the sin of rebellion against his majesty. As An Exhortation to Obedience states: “That is Gods ordinaunce, Gods commaundment and Gods holy will, that the whole body of every realme and all the members and partes of the same shalbe subject to their hed, their kynge.”3° Although Henry VIII’s institutional reform itself was rather unexpected, the public discourse applying the anthropomorphic analogy to legitimize it was not unprecedented in England at all. The comparison of the structure of society to the human body in English political thinking springs directly from the intellectual legacy of the twelfth-century English bishop, John of Salisbury. Instead of relying on the Pauline image of the “corpus mysticum” or Aristotle’s notion of society as a human organism, he developed a remarkably comprehensive description of the state in his work entitled Policratici sive de Nugis Curialium et Vestigiis Philosophorum, or, in short, Policraticus, first published in 1159.°%* His alleged source was Plutarch’s Institutio Traiani but apart from Salisbury’s reference, there is no available record to support the existence of Plutarch’s work. Today, the Policraticus is an excellent medieval “compendium of all the lore surrounding the organic theory of the State,”?5 which in fact remained influential for many centuries. According to Ernst Robert Curtius, it was printed all over Europe at least eight times between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.**° In the eight books of his work, John of Salisbury investigates how the individual can preserve his or her liberty and chance of maintaining a pleasant way of life by fulfilling a function in the organic body of the state. There is more at risk here than individual happiness. Similar to how illness attacks the human body, if any member of society falls sick, this makes the whole body unable to function properly; it therefore follows that preservation of the mutually beneficial cooperation of the individual members of society serves the interests of the whole community. Policraticus presents three alternations of the organic concept, the first of which describes the fully developed analogy as follows: 36: a Ronald B. Bond (ed.): Certain Sermons and Homilies (1547) and A Homily Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570), Toronto, Buffalo, London, Toronto University Press, 1987, 169. This work, originally written in Latin, has never been translated into English in its entirety. Only selections from some of the books have been published in English translation. In academic circles, the twentieth-century critical edition of the Latin original is cited most often, as it is widely accepted to be the most reliable version: Joannis Saresberiensis: Policraticus Sive de Nugis Curialium et Vestigiis Philosophorum, ed. Clement C. I. Webb, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1909. Barkan: Nature’s Work, 72. 366 Ernst Robert Curtius: European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1973, 140. 364 36: a + 97 +
