Matteo Nicolini

Articulating the Body Politic: Intersections in Law, Culture, and Society

The focus delivers a critical assessment of the manifold intersections between political power and the body politic within legal and societal contexts. Indeed, such intersections take different forms and serve different functions within different contexts. To this extent, the above-mentioned intersections contribute in forging the same scenario within which law, culture, and society interact. However, societal contexts have dramatically changed. As Alessandra Cordiano upholds in “The Sex of the Body Politic: Questioning the Legal Constraints on Genderism between Law and Literature,” gender identity is a recent conquest in Western legal culture. The contemporary categories on how the body politic is forged reveal a more relaxed approach towards homosexuality, transsexuality, intersexuality and even transvestism, thus overturning the traditional social order that is grounded on a binary conception of the law. Hence, “articulation” refers to how political power and body politic interrelate and therefore forge each other. As Sidia Fiorato has acutely pointed out, “the metaphor of the body politic [through its] multifarious articulations” holds such assumption: the concept of body politic is indeed “inscribed at all levels of society [...] and the political order [is] divided into different parts and functions that correspond to the members or organs of the community.” But, articulation may also be disruptive, and trigger instead a dis-articulation of the body politic. This is the outcome of sectionalism, which is usually due to the “confinement of interest to a narrow sphere, narrowness of outlook, undue accentuation of minor local, political, or social distinctions.”

Turning Vanity Fair into The Coelestial City: England’s Legal Narratives of the Body Politic from Bunyan to Thackeray

Abstract The article addresses the different narratives that characterize English constitutional history. It first examines the mainstream narrative, i. e., the retrospective reading of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century constitutional events dispensed by jurists and politicians in an attempt to pack the Establishment Constitution. It then focuses on the alternative legal narratives about the Constitution elaborated during the Civil War and the Restoration. Among them, it ascertains John Bunyan’s impact on the Establishment Constitution. Bunyan was a member of the New Model Army, a radical, and a Puritan who ended up in prison. Despite this background, he exerted a strong influence on Victorian society and on Thackeray’s representation of the body politic. As a consequence, Bunyan entered the political discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century when politicians started to reform English representative institutions, and therefore became part of the Establishment Constitution.