The modern discourse of political theology has developed in two major directions in the wake of Carl Schmitt, its ostensible founder. The first is philosophical or theoretical, differently exemplified by the likes of Hans Blumenberg and Giorgio Agamben. The second is exemplified by Ernst Kantorowicz's 1957 book The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. As recent scholarship by Victoria Kahn and Lorna Hutson has shown, Kantorowicz's book does have a veiled anti-Schmittian theoretical bent, and yet the book itself reads more as an attempt to trace the historical development of ideas around the intersection of sacral and juridical kingship. Both approaches are on evidence in the collection of essays here under review.

The essays in the first section take a more theoretical tack. Montserrat Herrero sets out to trace the myriad afterlives of Schmitt's political theology, offering a useful genealogy of how the field has unfolded over time. William Cavanaugh argues that political theologians read too little theology, giving the field a tilt toward modern secularism and away from religion; he hopes to open democracy to transcendence without Schmitt's authoritarianism or Catholic nostalgia. António Bento offers a richly suggestive essay on Schmitt's and Kantorowicz's competing conceptions of the church, arguing that Schmitt's invisible church never collapses entirely into the visible, whereas for Kantorowicz the juridical and mystical bodies of the church coincide.

Most of the essays, however, unfold along Kantorowiczian lines, in that Schmitt's influence is primarily felt indirectly, through a shared analytical framework that considers the relationship between sacral and secular forms of power. In the vein of Kantorowicz, these studies are generally historical, and generally medieval; a few essays range into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but a clear majority focus on the High and late Middle Ages of Western Europe. Essays that engage with the Crusades (by Martin Aurell and Jaume Aurell) address European concerns rather than taking up the question of contact with Islam in any sustained way. Simon Kow's essay on Chinese political theology similarly frames the matter by studying the way that Europeans—Bayle, Liebniz, and Montesquieu—put it to use. These approaches all have their merits, but they indicate the project's European framing. Two essays do venture toward Eastern Europe: Vinni Lucherini's on the sacral qualities of the Hungarian Crown, and Elena Kashina's on the use of spiritual tradition in constructing the Russian state across the early modern period. Kashina alone thinks about the West as a phenomenon, discussing Peter the Great's deliberate adoption of Western iconography in a way that breaks with the visual influence of the Mongol khans on the Russian monarchy. Things move in the direction of the early modern (or later) only occasionally, as in Kow's essay; a second essay by Herrero considering Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza as inheritors of Protestant scriptural interpretation; one by Rafael García Pérez on Toqueville's approach to religious revolution; and one by Juan Pablo Domínguez on Enlightenment perspectives on the Inquisition.

If Kantorowicz's historical studies converge, however cryptically, on something like a protodemocratic political theology, the historical essays here tend to confine their arguments to the cases at hand, as when José Maria Silva Rosa offers a careful reading of how John of Paris understands the distinctions between temporal and spiritual power, without stepping back into a larger theoretical framework. In some sense, this is just good history, laying aside the dangers of anachronism for a proper focus on the past. On the other hand, though, the term “political theology,” as both Schmitt and Kantorowicz used it, draws attention to the present political stakes in our understanding of the past. Indeed, Herrero argues in his first contribution here that Schmitt responds to Blumenberg by abandoning historical causation for a genealogical approach to political theology. The question, then, that this intriguing collection leaves open is what these case studies collectively amount to in our understanding of how political theology works. The editors suggest in their introduction that one effect is to challenge the progressive linearity of the secularization narrative, and the essays bear this out, but edited collections are necessarily polyvocal in ways that monographs are not. This collection thus affords a fertile seedbed for future work.