<r2r:ml lang="en"><p class="abstract" dir="ltr">This paper aims to analyze the innovations brought by an <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">xv</span>th century English jurist, John Fortescue, to the already existent metaphor of the body politic, innovations which will open the way for a new type of “body politic” within the English political thought. The main works I focus on are <em>De Laudibus Legum Angliae</em> and <em>The Governance of England</em>, where Fortescue’s new corporal paradigm is expressed the most poignantly. Without dedicating an entire treatise to the corporal analogy, as some of his successors, like Thomas Starkey or Edward Forset, will do, Fortescue brings nonetheless an important contribution to the evolution of this metaphor within an English context, by taking several steps away from the traditional formula of the body politic. What he offers new is, first and foremost, a “national” particularization of the body politic, describing in his works the traits of the English body politic and contrasting them with other such “organisms”, and the abandonment of the excessive abstracting from his predecessors, by applying his considerations to the existing political and social realities.</p></r2r:ml>