Abstract

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