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08631_Field_TCGG T396.txt
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1996-04-10
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Late in his great study, Kantorowicz summarizes a good
deal of his theme in a way that indicates how the legal fictions
clustering about the separation of the King’s two bodies led to
such characteristic fantasies as the danses macabres . These,
indeed, made up a kind of animated cartoon world which
dominated even Shakespearean imagery, and continued to
flourish in the eighteenth century, as Gray’s Elegy testifies. It
was the English in the fourteenth century who developed the
effigy in funerary rites as a visible expression of the King’s two
bodies. Kantorowicz writes (pp. 420­1):
No matter how we may wish to explain the
introduction of the effigy in 1327, with the funeral of
Edward II there begins, to our knowledge, the custom of
placing on top of the coffin the “roiall representation” or
“personage”, a figure or image ad similitudinem regis ,