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.

John Watkins is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. He is coauthor of Shakespeare's Foreign World's, and author of Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England and The Specter of Dido.

A fascinating interdisciplinary study of marriage diplomacy from the post-Roman period through the seventeenth century.... Watkins draws upon chronicle histories, medieval romances, diplomatic records, international society theory, pastoral verse, political pamphlets, and early modern drama to develop an ambitious and nuanced argument about the changing ideology of political marriages.... Watkins's book is both concise and elegantly structured given its very broad scope. It offers an important contribution to the study of diplomatic cultures, especially by articulating ideological positions that shaped the political roles of women, and scholars of any part of the European Middle Ages and early modern periods will learn a great deal from its longue durée narrative.

A powerful, wide-ranging study.... A triumphant, fruitful marriage of critical methodologies and fields. It encompasses literary and cultural history, diplomatic history, international relations, gender studies, and other approaches. Its comparatist focus has much to teach specialists in English literature.... Magisterial.

After Lavinia... provocatively aims at fostering a discussion about the nature of war and peacemaking in the premodern and modern worlds, and how the intertwined roles of gender, the passions, and, more generally, the irrational played a significant role in pre-Westphalian diplomatic society, and were later dangerously confined to the literary realm. In this sense, After Lavinia is a wonderful and thought-provoking book: it should be essential reading in and beyond the community of scholars working on these topics.

Watkins raises authentically interesting questions about politics, gender, and religion, and demonstrates the value of literary sources and literary analysis for this topic. It is especially valuable for assembling a range of texts on interdynastic marriage, including Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, the Venerable Bede, Paul the Deacon, Dudo, William of Apulia, Wace, William of Malmsbury, and others, theological works as well as twelfth- and thirteenth-century vernacular romances and their treatments of royal marriages.... The broad sweep of this study is impressive, displaying the range of possible practices for monarch, marrying in or out, up or down, lateral—or... choosing not to marry at all.

Watkins's work offers a fresh perspective on interdynastic marriage and on diplomacy. As he makes clear throughout the text, Watkins wants to uncover the woman's voice in diplomatic history. Throughout the text, he does just that, creating a strong scholarly analysis that foregrounds gender and affirms the importance of the domestic, the maternal, and the reproductive.... Overall, Watkins's fascinating and ambitious work offers a positive contribution to academic conversations on queenship, marriage, international diplomacy, and literary celebrations and critiques of dynastic marriage.

Watkins's book makes many insightful claims and raises a lot of intriguing questions about premodern mariage diplomacy.

Embarks upon an impressive tour of literary history to show how marriage acts served transnational diplomacy.... Historians will benefit from reading John Watkins' intellectually engaging literary history.

Watkins’s study of marriage diplomacy is a compelling work which proves an indispensable reference for readers of all creeds: from the literary analyst, to the specialist in diplomacy, gender studies or conflict studies, and to the lay reader trying to understand a volatile zeitgeist.... Dismissing the place of literature in the political episteme of a time and of all time has never been better argued as being a major error. Watkins’s opus is not only a major and fresh contribution to the field, it is an enlightening commentary on contemporary politics and on the necessity of a literary view of history.