position of the head is occupied by a prince, who is ‘subject only to God and to those
who act in His place on earth.’
4
At the heart of the commonwealth is the senate, ‘the
office of counsel and rulership’ and ‘nothing more glorious’ is more glorious than this
5
.
The eyes, ears, and tongue of the prince are the governors of provinces, who would rule
provinces in the name of the prince. Financial officers and keepers are compared to the
stomach and intestines. The armed hand is soldiers and the unarmed one is tax
collectors. Finally, the feet are compared with peasants ‘perpetually bound to the soil.’
6
This graphic representation of the political community as the human body proved highly
influential; for example, the thirteenth-century republican Ptolemy of Lucca and the late
fourteenth- century female political philosopher Christine de Pisan drew on John’s
organic analogies in their political works.
7
To be sure, John of Salisbury’s deployment of
a bodily metaphor was not the only source which other medieval thinkers appealed in
their elaboration of organic theory of the political community. Marsilius of Padua and
Nicholas of Cusa, for instance, had their own perspectives.
8
Nonetheless, the fact
remains that bodily analogies were employed widely in the Middle Ages and beyond,
constituting a tradition of political discourse in Western Europe.
The organic metaphors ‘visualized’ the political community, which is invisible and
intangible, thereby facilitating readers to grasp differing functions of various organs
within a unified whole of the ‘body politic’.
9
But was the organic analogy merely a
rhetorical device? Modern scholarship on the history of European political thought has
indeed identified the organic metaphors as a rhetorical tradition; however, the use of
organic metaphors and medical analogies was largely considered exclusively as a
rhetorical device that served to bolster premeditated political programs.
10
Few
investigations have attempted to look at the reference to the human body in political
discourses as the application of contemporary medical knowledge to political ideas and
problems.
11
Indeed, Europe at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
witnessed the revival of medical science; the Universities of Montpellier and Padua, for
instance, emerged as leading centers of medical research. Yet, medieval intellectuals
were not familiar with the academic specialization that we know today. Rather the
fluidity between disciplinary boundaries characterized medieval academic activities;
hence, from a medieval perspective, one cannot justly segregate medical studies from
other academic disciplines.
Thus emerges a question: did increasing medical knowledge contribute to the
making of discourses on the political community and government? The conventional
narratives of the history of Western political theory have largely focused on the
contributions to political theorizing of three academic disciplines: philosophy, law and
2
Convention