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the program. Hello in Macbeth Malcolm describes the magical healing powers of the

king. How he solicit heaven himself best knows, but

strangely visited people all swollen and ulcerous pitiful to the eye the mere despair of surgery he cures, hanging a golden stamp about their necks.

The idea that a monarch could heal, with his touch flowed from the idea that a king was sacred

appointed by God and above the judgment of earthly powers. This was called the divine right of kings and it

ended so powerfully into British culture during the 17th century that it shaped the

pomp and circumstance of the Stuart monarchs, imbued the writing of Shakespeare, provoked the political thinking of Milton

and Locke and helped a regi-slide about a century and a half before the French Revolution.

With me to discuss the divine writer of kings of Justin Champion, Professor of the History of Early Modern

ideas at Royal Holloway College University of London, Claire Jackson, lecturer and director of

studies in history at Trinity Hall Cambridge, and Tom Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College University of London.

Justin Champion, this is an idea that can be traced back the idea of the ruler as a god, can

be traced back a long way, but it became particularly important in Europe during and after the

reformation in the 16th century can you explain why it emerged so and became so

...