After Lavinia: A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy by John Watkins (review)

On the one hand, interdynastic marriage diplomacy before the modern age was seen as a good thing: optimistic, cosmopolitan, hopeful. Based on affinity and consanguinity, it could ensure peace and prosperity, foster assimilation and integration, and bring cultural and political harmony. On the other hand, such expectations could be dashed by xenophobic, nationalistic, or otherwise reactionary attitudes. According to pessimists, ever skeptical of the romantic or emotional, such marriages brought alien impurities and further warfare. The reality lay somewhere in the middle, for marriage, like diplomacy, can be stabilizing and enduring at some times but messy and circumstantial at others; it can reconcile tensions just as easily as it can cause them.

Watkins's new book makes use of epics, romances, plays, and other works of literature to trace how marriage both forged and fractured dynastic unions, from the time of Virgil's Aeneid to that of the Enlightenment. Starting with divergent readings of Aeneas's marriage with Lavinia, Watkins demonstrates how literary texts theorized the role of marriage in international diplomacy. He discusses how women played a crucial role in diplomacy, especially during the high Middle Ages; how ideas of interdynastic marriage helped to construct a common European diplomatic culture; and how a devaluation of marriage diplomacy in the early modern period was occasioned by state centralization, the Protestant Reformation, and the rise of print. Watkins's prose sometimes has a "conspicuous literariness" to it (a charge he lays at the feet of Gregory of Tours), but his analyses, especially of Shakespeare, are welcome: he argues that the playwright exposed "marriage diplomacy as a comic, even absurdist fiction," while expressing his preference for a more isolated and insular England. Shakespeare was by no means the first to be suspicious of neighbors. The Old Testament supplies plenty of instances, though none so flavorful as the twelfth-century Danish historian, Saxo Grammaticus, who denounced the Saxons in these words: "From that bilge no small nourishments of debauchery have flowed into our country's throats. For hence run the lavish tables, more fashionable kitchens, the sordid offices of cooks; hence flows the filth of various sausages."