Afterword

This chapter details events following Ernst Kantorowicz's death in September 1963. He left instructions in his will that he “did not wish to have any kind of funeral,” that he be cremated, and that his ashes be sent to his niece Beate Salz. She was then teaching at the University of Puerto Rico and he had told her that he wanted the ashes to be scattered in a bay off the island of St. John. Kantorowicz's insistence that he wanted no funeral was inherent in his lifelong revulsion for religious ceremonies. However, it was impossible for him to control his posthumous reputation. Medievalists paid tribute to the importance of his work from the time of his death, and the Kantorowicz boom that began in the late 1970s catapulted him into the ranks of the most noted humanistic scholars of the twentieth century.