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After Lavinia A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy 1st Edition

SKU: 9781501708510

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Full Title

After Lavinia A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy 1st Edition

Author(s)

John Watkins

Edition

1st Edition

ISBN

9781501708510, 9781501707575, 9781501708527

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Format

PDF and EPUB

Description

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.

Availability: In Stock

After Lavinia A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy 1st Edition

SKU: 9781501708527

Original price was: $150.00.Current price is: $24.99.

Access After Lavinia A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy 1st Edition Now. Discount up to 90%

Categories: ,

Additional information

Full Title

After Lavinia A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy 1st Edition

Author(s)

John Watkins

Edition

1st Edition

ISBN

9781501708527, 9781501707575, 9781501708510

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Format

PDF and EPUB

Description

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.