'Head or heart?' Revisited: Physilogy and political thought in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries

• Autores: Takashi Shogimen
• Localización: History of political thought, ISSN 0143-781X, Vol. 28, Nº 2, 2007, págs. 208-229
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Medical metaphors pervade medieval European political writings. No attempt has been made to establish the relationship between bodily imageries of the political community and anatomical and/or physiological knowledge. A survey of bodily metaphors shows that the primacy of the head of the body politic was challenged at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by an alternative view: the pre-eminence of the heart. This coincided with the penetration of Aristotelian physiology into scholastic medicine, which triggered debates over the most important member of the body natural: is it the head or the heart? The medical inspiration for the conceptualization of the body politic illustrates the great impact of the 'Aristotelian revolution' in medieval political thought.