Medieval jurists transferred the husband-wife bond into the prince-state union

Evidence

The hermeneutic transfer of this verse from the church to the state, to the political sphere “proper” in the hands of medieval jurists, produced a new de6nition of “the relations between Prince and state” on the basis of a powerful analogy that led, for example, to basing the staging of coronations on the model of marriage ceremonies. In this way, the classical spiritbody distinction was refigured, by way of the husband-wife analogy, into a theologico-political notion. Hence, if it was said that “the man is the head of the wife and the wife the body of the man,” a jurist could infer that “after the same fashion, the Prince is the head of the realm, and the realm the body of the Prince.” Love and matrimony thus provide the analogical basis for thinking the body politic that is “at one and the same time a plural entity consisting of all … subjects and a single entity, the King.” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 524