Edited by Michele Bacci, Gohar Grigoryan, and Manuela Studer-Karlen, this volume consists of fifteen studies initially presented during a 2020 conference at the University of Fribourg as part of a larger project on Royal Epiphanies. In addition to the hardback version, this funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation allows the book to appear fully available in an open access format. The volume examines the ways in which the physical body of the medieval ruler served as a staged visual representation (or mise-en-scène) of larger conceptions of rulership and power. Each contribution plays with Ernst Kantorowicz’s idea of the king’s two bodies: the corporeal body and the ethereal body politic. While many are familiar with this concept, the comparative examples (ranging chronologically from the third to seventeenth centuries CE and largely centered on the Mediterranean with a few case studies drawn from Mediterranean-adjacent spaces) illuminate the dynamics by which societies enacted these associations. In so doing, it focuses less on the abstract political theology and more on the extent to which “extra-physical majesty embodied in rulers’ physicality could be grasped by beholders in visual, sensorial, and performative terms” (14).
The volume arranges the contributions mostly in a geographic order, moving from east to west to discuss the different geo-historical milieus of royal representation. The essay that disrupts this trend is the first one, by co-editor Michele Bacci. His essay uses evidence from his research in Arabic-Islamic contexts of the western Mediterranean to set the stage (pun intended) for the contributions that follow as well as to set up a minimal scholarly apparatus for understanding the common themes and the chronological, geographical, and transdisciplinary diversity of the collected essays. In the essay that follows, Matthew Canepa connects representations of the sovereign’s body in Sasanian Iran to “highly significant, and sometimes precious, substances” (48). Images carved into living rock as a monumental relief signal to the gaze of the viewer the timeless, immutable nature of the king; images crafted in silver and gold would signal that the value of the object was in no small part due to the royal figure represented as well as to his promises of political or spiritual benefit. In essay 3, Natia Natsvlishvili discusses the seventeenth-century architectural projects of Queen Mariam Dadiani of Georgia to underscore the patronage of female founders as well as the agency the queen exerted through her pursuit of Christian projects while married to two different Muslim rulers. In essay 4, Gohar Grigoryan uses the case study on King Lewon IV (d. 1341) of Cilician Armenia to ruminate on the place of royal representations as proxies for the person of the ruler, whose corporality meant that he or she was not physically ubiquitous (a common concern throughout the essays as well as scholarship on the figure of the ruler). Here, the author demonstrates a specific visual program to portray this particular king as “righteous,” an attribute that contrasts with many other kings in this regnal line who were typically more focused on aspects of religious piety and devotion. These innovations echo a larger concern of royal image production: the need to continuously look for new ways to communicate the royal image, a conscious construct that ultimately could never fully guarantee how that image would be received by the viewers. The ways that such pictorial programs could backfire is illustrated in essay 5, by Jacopo Gnisci, which examines royal imagery in the rock-hewn church of Gännätä Maryam. These portraits acted in accordance with gift-giving customs of the period, while serving to tie together different aspects of the kingdom as part of a legitimizing agenda. However, the visual equation of the emperor and his family not as supplicants but rather co-equals with the saints, Christ, and the Virgin Mary failed to be replicated in visual programs in the centuries that followed.
Essays 6-8 cluster around Byzantine contexts. Antony Eastmond considers the performative action of the mise-en-scène, in both its staging and its theatricality, as a means to manifest authority and “reveal divinely inspired powers” (153). Maria Parani extends that logic through embodiments of power specifically through sartorial choices. She argues that dress “beyond a means of exalting the emperor as befitted his majesty, had the power to turn a mortal man into the ruler of the oikoumene” (161). Finally, Manuela Studer-Karlen echoes the conversations about royal imagery in devotional spaces found in other essays of the volume through an examination of placing rulers in the visual depictions of liturgical narratives in churches and monasteries.
Essay 9 marks the transitional point of the volume from the eastern Mediterranean to the western Mediterranean through Eleonora Tioli’s examination of the Mongol khan’s body as described in the ethnographic studies of medieval Latin Europe. These travelogues situated the body of the khan as a site of power, and transformed western imagination to conform that physical appearance to long-held Western physiognomic theories and iconography. This move to the western Mediterranean is continued in essays 10-11 through a focus on the Italian peninsula. Kayoko Ichikawa investigates the place of the Virgin Mary in the city-state of Siena and argues that the visual program of Marian devotion (which exploded in popularity following her the miraculous intercession ascribed to her at the Battle of Montaperti in 1260) served to situate her as the religious and civic ruler/ surrogate monarch. In contrast to the idealized bodies of the two previous essays, in essay 11, Mirko Vagnoni assesses the use of the natural body of Robert of Anjou in his commissioned portraits as one that does not communicate messages of power but rather of humility and religious devotion.
The final selection of case studies (essays 12-14) focuses on the Iberian Peninsula. Aleksandra Rutkowska examines the royal pantheon at San Isidoro in León and how it used reburial as a way to update and communicate shifting geopolitical realities. In many ways, this presents an interesting challenge to Kantorowicz, who shifts focus from the embodied self of the king to the next monarch once the former has died. It is also of note that this essay begins to delve into a larger conversation on the practice of royal reburial in the Castilian-Leonese context, perhaps as a function of the fact that one consistent dynastic pantheon fails to materialize in these polities as opposed to other instances in Europe, such as the Basilica of Saint-Denis. In essay 13, Sofía Fernández Pozzo examines the oft-studied Llibre dels Fets by Jaime I to trace the ways in which the monarch communicated his presence in his autobiography. Marta Serrano-Coll continues this examination of textual sources in Aragonese contexts through her investigation of the royal presence of Pedro IV. This particular monarch was focused on making visible “in the eyes of his subjects the political theology he personified” (312). Due to the presence of his order of ceremony and other instances of textual and visual evidence, Pedro IV serves as an apt case study for the author to systematically trace the various means he staged himself and Aragonese royal power. The volume concludes with a final essay, by Sabine Sommerer, which examines the ideas of how to make visible a monarch who is, by nature of his physicality, habitually absent (described as the “paradox of the present absentee” [315]) through a comparative analysis of medieval royal thrones.
Overall, this volume successfully argues that the ruler’s physical body mattered, and does so with a variety of case studies and wonderfully color-illustrated figures. It should be noted that while the title refers to “medieval cultures,” this comprehensive coverage should be narrowed down to the Mediterranean, and in the cases of Sasanian Iran and Solomonic Ethiopia, Mediterranean-adjacent, world. Even then, it seems to be an omission for the volume to be so Christian-centric and to not include more Islamic coverage; the only substantial references are in Bacci’s quasi-introductory remarks. Nevertheless, the editors have assembled a stellar cast of contributors in order to discuss the place of the ruler’s body in the visual, sensorial, and emotional representations of rulership, which should be read with interest by specialists of political theology as well as those more generally interested in the Mediterranean and royal studies.