Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz (May 3, 1895 – September 9, 1963) was a German historian of medieval political and intellectual history and art, known for his 1927 book Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite on Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, and The King's Two Bodies (1957) on medieval and early modern ideologies of monarchy and the state. He was an elected member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Career Early life and education Kantorowicz was born in Posen (then part of Prussia) to a wealthy, assimilated German-Jewish family, and as a young man was groomed to take over his family's prosperous liquor distillery business. He served as an officer in the German Army for four years in World War I. After the war, he matriculated at the University of Berlin to study economics, at one point also joining a right-wing militia that fought against Polish forces in the Greater Poland Uprising (1918–1919) and helped put down the Spartacist uprising in Berlin. The following year, he transferred briefly to the University of Munich, where once again he was involved in armed clashes between leftists and pro-government militias, but soon thereafter settled on the University of Heidelberg where he continued to enroll in economics courses while developing a broader interest in Arabic, Islamic Studies, history, and geography. While in Heidelberg, Kantorowicz became involved with the so-called George-Kreis or George circle, a group of artists and intellectuals devoted to the German symbolist poet and aesthete Stefan George, believing that George's poetry and philosophy would become the foundation of a great revival of the nationalist spirit in post-war Germany. In 1921, Kantorowicz was awarded a doctorate supervised by Eberhard Gothein based on a slim dissertation on "artisan associations" in the Muslim world. Frederick the Second Although his degree was in Islamic economic history, Kantorowicz's interests soon turned to the European Middle Ages and to ideas about kingship in particular. His association with the elitist and culturally conservative George-Kreis inspired Kantorowicz to undertake writing a sweeping and highly unorthodox biography of the great Holy Roman emperor Frederick II, published in German in 1927 and English in 1931. Instead of offering a more typical survey of laws, institutions, and important political and military achievements of Frederick's reign, the book struck a distinctly panegyrical tone, portraying Frederick as a tragic hero and an idealized "Roman German". It included no footnotes and seemed