Overview

The Renaissance jurist Alberico Gentili once quipped that, just like comedies, all wars end in a marriage. In medieval and early modern Europe, marriage treaties were a perennial feature of the diplomatic landscape. When one ruler decided to make peace with his enemy, the two parties often sealed their settlement with marriages between their respective families. In After Lavinia, John Watkins traces the history of the practice, focusing on the unusually close relationship between diplomacy and literary production in Western Europe from antiquity through the seventeenth century, when marriage began to lose its effectiveness and prestige as a tool of diplomacy. Watkins begins with Virgil's foundational myth of the marriage between the Trojan hero Aeneas and the Latin princess, an account that formed the basis for numerous medieval and Renaissance celebrations of dynastic marriages by courtly poets and propagandists. In the book's second half, he follows the slow decline of diplomatic marriage as both a tool of statecraft and a literary subject, exploring the skepticism and suspicion with which it was viewed in the works of Spenser and Shakespeare. Watkins argues that the plays of Corneille and Racine signal the passing of an international order that had once accorded women a place of unique dignity and respect.

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9781501707575

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After Lavinia is an excellent book: extremely ambitious, successful, and important. Its originality is one of its great strengths, along with its clarity and breadth. John Watkins's topic is a massive one but one virtually never studied in this way. He writes elegantly, and his often complex arguments are clearly presented. This book makes contributions to a whole raft of academic fields-comparative literature, diplomatic history, political history, cultural history, gender studies, medieval studies, English studies, French studies, Renaissance studies, even classics. It should find a broad readership; I predict that it will garner much praise as a major contribution to our understanding of the intersection of gender, political history, and literature. The fascinating climax to After Lavinia is a set of original and persuasive readings of historical tragedies by the major European dramatists of the period-Shakespeare, Corneille, and Racine-in which Watkins shows with exciting clarity and detail the shifts in emphasis and affective power that accompany the changing role of the queen as political actor-and spell her demise as a figure of diplomatic agency. -Timothy Hampton, Aldo Scaglione and Marie M. Burns Distinguished Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, author of Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe

""After Lavinia is an excellent book: extremely ambitious, successful, and important. Its originality is one of its great strengths, along with its clarity and breadth. John Watkins's topic is a massive one but one virtually never studied in this way. He writes elegantly, and his often complex arguments are clearly presented. This book makes contributions to a whole raft of academic fields-comparative literature, diplomatic history, political history, cultural history, gender studies, medieval studies, English studies, French studies, Renaissance studies, even classics. It should find a broad readership; I predict that it will garner much praise as a major contribution to our understanding of the intersection of gender, political history, and literature. The fascinating climax to After Lavinia is a set of original and persuasive readings of historical tragedies by the major European dramatists of the period-Shakespeare, Corneille, and Racine-in which Watkins shows with exciting clarity and detail the shifts in emphasis and affective power that accompany the changing role of the queen as political actor-and spell her demise as a figure of diplomatic agency.""-Timothy Hampton, Aldo Scaglione and Marie M. Burns Distinguished Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, author of Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe

Author Information

John Watkins is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of After Lavinia: A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy and coauthor of Shakespeare's Foreign World's: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age, both from Cornell. He is also theauthor of Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty and The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic.

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