Lowell Gallagher, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 (Winter 2018):
After Lavinia enters a staggeringly complex field and teases out an extraordinary piece of comparatist and cross-disciplinary.... The canvas is vast, ranging from the late antique era through the French late seventeenth century, and the mythopoetic paradigm of interdynastic marriage—Lavinia's marriage to Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid—lends focus to the long-range problems posed by Lavinia's silence in the epic: how to understand the conflicts faced by foreign brides who came to occupy such critical roles in European peacemaking, and how to register the scope of the problems following the advent of the discrete nation-state and modern diplomacy's displacement of the marriage game as a tool in international relations.... This magisterial study [is] one of the year's touchstones.
Timothy Hampton, Aldo Scaglione and Marie M. Burns Distinguished Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, author of Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe:
After Lavinia is an excellent book: extremely ambitious, successful, and important. Its originality is one of its great strengths, along with its clarity and breadth. John Watkins's topic is a massive one but one virtually never studied in this way. He writes elegantly, and his often complex arguments are clearly presented. This book makes contributions to a whole raft of academic fields—comparative literature, diplomatic history, political history, cultural history, gender studies, medieval studies, English studies, French studies, Renaissance studies, even classics. It should find a broad readership; I predict that it will garner much praise as a major contribution to our understanding of the intersection of gender, political history, and literature. The fascinating climax to After Lavinia is a set of original and persuasive readings of historical tragedies by the major European dramatists of the period—Shakespeare, Corneille, and Racine—in which Watkins shows with exciting clarity and detail the shifts in emphasis and affective power that accompany the changing role of the queen as political actor—and spell her demise as a figure of diplomatic agency.
Amanda Walling:
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.
