| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776. By Brendan McConville. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xviii, 322 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3065-9.)

What three faces? Brendan McConville tells us that the inspiration for his title comes from Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (1957, p. 21n12). But unlike Kantorowicz, who clearly differentiated between the body natural and the body political, McConville is enigmatic. His title for part 2 is "Three Faces," but it concludes that there were "at least three conceptions of the king," covering a spectrum of "subjective understandings" corresponding to the "entire social order" (pp. 143, 106, 143). Gentlemen, yeomen, women, Indians, and slaves entertained their own competing versions of the king's face. A "world in disorder found it had a king with many faces" (p. 171).

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