The Good Ambassadress: Gender and Diplomacy in the Marriage of Figaro

True to his pathbreaking and imaginative scholarship, David Armitage has discovered a rich fabric of connections between opera and international law — links that have been largely overlooked by previous scholars. By reading Beaumarchais and Mozart alongside Abraham Wicquefort and other contemporary sources on ambassadorial practice, he brings out some of the implications of his historical and sociological argument that opera was born not only with the modern state, as has long been argued, but also with modern interstate relations and the law of nations. He makes a powerful case for the affinities between opera and international law, recapturing not just the broad interest both held at the time among political elites, but also their disruptive and even revolutionary possibilities.