Lavinia's Legacy

In After Lavinia, John Watkins traces the history of marriage treaties between royal families, 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 celebration of dynastic marriage 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 teh 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. -- from dust jacket.