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After Lavinia: A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy

Online ISBN:
9781501708527
Print ISBN:
9781501707575
Publisher:
Cornell University Press
Book

After Lavinia: A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy

John Watkins
John Watkins
University of Minnesota
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Published:
1 May 2017
Online ISBN:
9781501708527
Print ISBN:
9781501707575
Publisher:
Cornell University Press

Abstract

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. This book 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. The book 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. It 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 Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare. The book argues that the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine signal the passing of an international order that had once accorded women a place of unique dignity and respect.

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