Dismembering the Body Politic: Medical Metaphor in the Writings of Erasmus

This article examines the use of political analogies to the physical body employed by the quintessential Northern humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam. While medical metaphors are found across the vast range of his writings, he stands at a distance from his medieval predecessors and most of his Renaissance contemporaries, who also relied on bodily imagery for their conceptions of political order. Rather, Erasmus did not subscribe to a single model of medicine but drew indiscriminately from the three main schools of physiological science: Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Galenism. Specifically, I concentrate on Erasmus’s handling of three central features of conventional medieval and Renaissance medical metaphors for politics: (1) the location of the seat of the body’s primary governing force; (2) the relationship between the body and the soul; and (3) the functional organization of the members of the body, especially in connection with the prince.