Kantorowicz
Stories of a Historian
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20660410 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Claudia Breger (0000-0003-0418-6028), Alain Boureau, Stephen Nichol (0000-0001-8918-1474), Stephen G Nichols, Gabrielle M Spiegel |
| Year | 2003 |
| Volume | 76 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 461 |
| Publication date | 2003-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The German Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-8831 • E-ISSN: 1756-1183 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3252251 |
| OpenAlex | W2035130663 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
Boureau, Alain. Kantorowicz: Stories of a Historian. Transl. by Stephen G. Nichols and Gabrielle M. Spiegel. Foreword by Martin Jay. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xxi + 112pp. $44.00 hardcover. Boureau's study on Ernst was first published in 1990. After translations into German and Italian, the English edition now available presents further evidence for the Kantorowicz Renaissance of the 1990s: the rediscovery of a historian whose King's Bodies (1957) has become a crucial point of reference for theoretical investigations into the workings of authority and collectivity. German-Jewish scholar was, however, also the author of Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite (1927), a biography which attested to its author's affiliation with the anti-democratic circle around Stefan George, and was admired by Hitler, Goring, and Mussolini (see Boureau, 5). Boureau's study seeks to explain what has been referred to as the bodies of Kantorowicz's and work: the configuration of continuity and discontinuity in the trajectory of his thought. In pursuing this goal, Boureau wrote a complex contribution to at least three larger issues: the historiography of the heterogenous field of Weimar thought, the historical archaeology of theory, and the methodological discussion about the writing of history. As Boureau explains in his preface to the American translation, he was intrigued by the scope of narrative experimentation that Kantorowicz's biography offered, since the historian tried to efface all traces of his life (xiv). Confronted with the resulting lack of evidence, Boureau approaches his re/constructive endeavor by working with both fictional and historical co-texts. Continually discussing the speculative nature of his procedure, he highlights the fictive elements of historiography, and often presents more than one story. At the same time, Boureau stresses his refusal of relativism (xviii), i.e, his intention to take truth seriously, while not rejecting the virtual embedded in the possible (xix). In a series of chapters from The Hidden Body to Two Bodies, Boureau traces Kantorowicz's con/textual histories, starting with the 1927 Frederick biography and ending with the 1957 masterpiece on medieval political theology. latter developed the account on the historical power of metaphoric configurations that fascinates readers today (see Jay, xi). Implicitly, however, this performative view was present already in the nationalist 1927 biography, which showed the medieval emperor as an artist creatively producing his own success (16). Between these two textual points of reference, Boureau traces the genealogy of Kantorowicz's theory
Art · Literature · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Central European Literary Studies · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · History
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,1 |
| Citation span | 2006 - 2013 (8) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |