"medieval political theology". The book traced the ways in which theologians, historians, and canon lawyers in the Middle Ages and early modern period understood "the king" as both a mortal individual and an institution which transcends time. Drawing on a diverse array of textual and visual sources, including Shakespeare and Dante, The King's Two Bodies made a major contribution to the way historians and political scientists came to understand the evolution of ideas about authority and charisma vested in a single individual versus transpersonal conceptions of the realm or the state in pre-modern Europe. The book remains a classic in the field. Death Kantorowicz died in his home in Princeton of an aortic aneurysm at age 68. Reception Cantor controversy Kantorowicz was the subject of a controversial biographical sketch in the book Inventing the Middle Ages (1991) by the medievalist Norman Cantor. Cantor suggested that, but for his Jewish heritage, the young Kantorowicz could be considered a Nazi in terms of his intellectual temperament and cultural values. Cantor compared Kantorowicz with another contemporary German medievalist, Percy Ernst Schramm, who worked on similar topics and later joined the Nazi Party and served as the staff diarist for the German High Command during the war. In addition to highlighting Kantorowicz's elitist nationalism in the Weimar period, Cantor falsely claimed that Kantorowicz had been under the protection of the Nazi government. Kantorowicz's defenders, including his student Robert L. Benson, responded that although as a younger man Kantorowicz embraced the Romantic ultranationalism of the George-Kreis, he had only contempt for Nazism and was a vocal critic of Hitler's regime, both before and after the war. Other historians who have criticized Kantorowicz in other respects have also since rejected Cantor's arguments, including David Abulafia and Robert E. Lerner. Conrad Leyser, summarizing the controversy in his 2016 introduction to The King's Two Bodies, describes Cantor's account as a "tissue of falsehoods and half-truths", but also a predictable reaction to Kantorowicz's own suppression of his German past. Michael Lipkin, also in 2016, concluded that Cantor was right to note the right-wing politics of Frederick the Second in particular, but he "cripples his argument by massaging his story". Works Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, Georg Bondi, 1927. Das Geheime Deutschland, Vorlesung, 1933. Works in English Frederick II.: 1194–1250 (1931) (online at Archive.org) "A Norman Finale of the Exultet and the Rite of Sarum", The Harvard Theological Review, 34 (2),