In recent generations, the study of dynastic politics and diplomatic history has undergone a revival. This field provides invaluable context for understanding international relations and focuses on aspects of cultural exchange and intellectual currents far more than previously. The "age of Louis XIV" has not been immune from this resurrection of interest in foreign policy and the conduct of diplomacy.

This book is the first serious full-length study of Louis XIV's diplomatic relations with the small states of northern Italy, specifically the duchies of Parma, Modena, and Mantua-Monferrato. Louis's desire to be seen as a peacemaker (despite his obvious bellicosity) extended to Italy, where he asserted the French crown's potential as a broker of peace between rival dynasties. But his evident self-interest, and the need to preserve France's perceived traditional alliance with the House of Savoy, undermined these efforts. He also failed to defend the interests of the dukes of Parma and Modena in their quarrels with the Holy See. After apparent successes in the Franco-Dutch War, Louis believed that he could undermine Spanish influence over the princes of Italy. But his attempts to do so antagonised both the Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs and the Lombardy dukes themselves, resulting in renewed war.

Louis XIV and the Peace of Europe analyses diplomatic culture at Versailles and at the small Italian courts, and assesses examples of artistic exchange. It will be valuable reading for undergraduates, graduate students, and historians of the field, as well as for those interested in Louis XIV and Italian culture more generally.

Friso Wielenga's detailed history of the Netherlands traces its political development from independence to today, incorporating significant explorations of culture, economics, international relations, colonisation and decolonisation in the process. It provides a thorough and well-balanced overview of the key moments in and vital aspects of Dutch history since 1500. Challenging incorrect assumptions concerning political consensus and religious toleration in the country, A History of the Netherlands offers a masterful analysis of domestic politics and the nation's international involvements.

This new edition includes:

* Enhanced and expanded examinations of 21st century developments to the present
* Greater coverage of the Dutch role in the slave trade, the Atlantic trade and the Glorious Revolution
* More material on multiculturalism and integration politics and the World War Two deportation and extermination of the Dutch Jewry
* Historiographical updates throughout

The book is vital reading for anyone looking for a rich understanding of the Netherlands and its past.

In Russia, food has a hugely important role in political, symbolic, and practical terms. In this illuminating history of Russian food in the modern age, Catriona Kelly - a leading cultural historian and keen amateur cook - reflects on this and an environment where what you eat (and drink) indicates how patriotic you are.

Kelly argues that an expectation of 'feeding' is embedded in attitudes to the state as provider, and that rationing systems have traditionally replicated and even enforced social hierarchies. The book looks at how Russian food is intimately connected with family and friends, and was an important source of delight even in the Soviet period, when official culinary provision and practices ostensibly sought to promote nutrition above all, and food was often short. Russian Food since 1800 traces these complex and contradictory associations. It also examines various shifts in diet and cuisine over the last three centuries, including the ways in which old traditions such as pickling and jam-making sit alongside wider world influences from the vast imperial hinterland in the Baltic, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, as well as Western Europe and America.

Through the lens of identification procedures, this book examines how the processes of state-building affected European societies during the Napoleonic period. By focusing on the Kingdom of Italy, the author shows how the top-down change usually associated with Napoleonic state-building had to compete and share spaces with the agencies of other often-neglected actors such as local bureaucrats, the clergy, and common people.

What emerges is the coexistence of different understandings of personal identities, defined as "cultures of identification". One was rooted in the traditional habits of the population and based on a continuous performance of identities, allowing for a certain degree of fluidity. The other, promoted by the Napoleonic administration, envisaged legal and fixed identities that were to be managed directly by agents of the state. Personal identification in Napoleonic Italy was thus more of a battleground than a mere field of action for the "modernizing" activities of state authorities.

Analyzing a period of momentous change for European societies, Cultures of Identification can be profitably read by students and researchers interested in the history of state-building, policing, social control, and personal identification.

The Russian Intelligentsia is the first single-volume history of a small but tremendously influential group of Russian intellectuals who achieved world renown in a variety of spheres. While previous accounts have addressed the history of individuals within this collective, Christopher Read offers the first explanation of the intelligentsia as a group. Read traces the vast debates that broke out between, and within, a multitude of intellectual factions, and contextualizes the ideas of the group within the framework of cultural, social, political, and economic development from the late 18th century to the present day.

This comprehensive yet accessible account demonstrates how the Russian intelligentsia morphed from one incarnation to the next, and effectively situates this change and continuity within a pan-European context. It considers the role of the intelligentsia throughout its origins, its transformation during the Russian Revolution, and since the collapse of communism, and highlights the beliefs of key figures such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Pavlov, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Mikhail Gorbachev. In doing so, Read provides an essential guide to a fascinating aspect of Russia's social and cultural history.

This book presents an overall picture of the constraints faced at different stages of the translation process, providing a more scientific approach to descriptive translation studies.

The study investigates translation constraints at three different levels. The micro-system includes the original work, the translator, and the translation itself. The meso-system includes various factors that represent power, such as individuals, groups, and institutions. The book also examines the macro-system, which includes factors related to culture, society, and even the global context. Drawing on the principles of literary hermeneutics, this book advances the study of translation constraints from description to interpretation through systematic analysis. Incorporating the latest scholarship from both national and international sources, the book discusses translation studies when it explores translation constraints and analyses translation constraints when it discusses translation studies.

The book will be of interest to scholars and students of translation theory and practice and Chinese studies. It will also be of value to translation professionals.

Of Mind and Machine provides a broad perspective on multi-level dialogic engagements between text and reader as seen from the use of language in presenting information to generate a discursive experience in various sociocultural settings.

The book observes contexts such as national literature in translation, diplomatic speech events, visual-verbal inter-semiotic translation, second language learning, interpreter training, and computer-aided teaching of translation and bilingual writing. These present a unifying interest in textual accountability between form, function, and effect that has been examined from a dual perspective of rhetoric and pragmatics. The research embodies a significant prospect of integration of academic originality with technological innovation to advance language education in the present digital era. Theoretically well-founded, the book does not confine itself to a self-contained system of conceptions and methods. Instead, it demonstrates a rich variety of research possibilities in support of theorisation and education in the field of language and translation studies.

This edited volume is primarily intended for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers, and teachers within the fields of language and translation, applied linguistics, and discourse analysis.

Monsignor Michael Nazir-Ali draws on the rich history of Ecclesia Anglicana, the complex reality that has been the English church from the beginning - he discusses its glories, achievements, vicissitudes and failures; as well as the expansion and adaptation of this 'Anglican' heritage to different parts of the world and many cultures.

Nazir-Ali starts with the different ways in which England was first evangelized and how, in turn, the Church of (or in) England (Ecclesia Anglicana) was able to send missionaries to continental Europe for primary evangelism and church planting. He examines the more recent past with the evangelical and Catholic revivals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and their significance for mission both at home and abroad. The formation of mission agencies gave a new impetus to mission, challenging people to give, to pray, and to go. He then considers what we can learn from mission today in different parts of the world; providing specific examples of such missionary activity of the churches in Nigeria and Kenya, as well as the churches in South East Asia.

The book examines how the gospel connects with culture, what we need to learn from the global Church about mission and ministry, the different models for mission and ministry, ranging from the incarnational to the itinerant, from inculturation to social and political activism and from embassy to hospitality.

This textbook provides a practical introduction to the fields of forensic phonetics and forensic linguistics. Addressing how these fields are both distinct yet closely related, the book demonstrates how experts from both fields can work together to investigate and deliver justice in complex legal situations.

With pedagogical features including real-life case studies, exercises, and links to further reading, topics covered include:

• Profiling from spoken and written texts
• Disputed meaning, and how meaning is made and evolves
• Interviewing techniques, including working around those who might be considered linguistically vulnerable
• Author and speaker determination
• Audio enhancement and authentication of recordings
• Language analysis in the asylum procedure (LAAP)

Accompanied by online audio and video resources as well as signposting readers to freely available software to aid their studies, this book is the ideal springboard for students beginning work in forensic phonetics, forensic speech science, forensic linguistics, and law and language.

Marking 30 years of contrastive corpus linguistics, this volume provides a state-of-the-art of the field, charting its development over time and expanding the boundaries of the discipline.

Focusing on a diversity of methods and approaches to language comparison, it uses both comparable and translation corpora, and explores a broad range of language registers from newspaper reporting and spoken political discourse to film scripts and football match reports. Using English as the pivot language for each chapter, the volume offers contrastive bilingual and trilingual perspectives on a number of languages, including Czech, Finnish, French, German, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish, covering a typologically diverse field. By exploring the application of complex multi-genre multilingual data sets and expanding the horizons of contrastive studies, it demonstrates how a juxtaposition of cross-linguistic and register variation can deepen our insight into language variation and use.

The volume is dedicated to two prominent contrastive corpus linguists: Karin Aijmer and Bengt Altenberg, who have decisively shaped the discipline from its very beginnings. The book opens with a chapter by Aijmer, reflecting on the current breadth and future prospects of research in the area while pointing to emergent trends with an insight that only she can offer.

Do you want to gain a deeper understanding of how big tech analyses and exploits our text data, or investigate how political parties differ by analysing textual styles, associations and trends in documents? Or create a map of a text collection and write a simple QA system yourself?

This book explores how to apply state-of-the-art text analytics methods to detect and visualise phenomena in text data. Solidly based on methods from corpus linguistics, natural language processing, text analytics and digital humanities, this book shows readers how to conduct experiments with their own corpora and research questions, underpin their theories, quantify the differences and pinpoint characteristics. Case studies and experiments are detailed in every chapter using real-world and open access corpora from politics, World English, history, and literature. The results are interpreted and put into perspective, pitfalls are pointed out, and necessary pre-processing steps are demonstrated. This book also demonstrates how to use the programming language R, as well as simple alternatives and additions to R, to conduct experiments and employ visualisations by example, with extensible R-code, recipes, links to corpora, and a wide range of methods. The methods introduced
can be used across texts of all disciplines, from history or literature to party manifestos and patient reports.

This edited volume showcases how teacher educators around the world engage with critical and dialogic approaches to prepare TESOL professionals.

Language teachers are at the forefront of supporting the academic and social needs of increasingly ethnically and linguistically diverse student populations around the globe, and preparing critical and dialogic TESOL teachers with social justice orientations is essential to helping language learners fulfil their academic and linguistic potential. Although more experienced TESOL teachers may be able to agentively implement critical and dialogic approaches to instruction, we know little about what TESOL teacher educators do to help train and prepare language teachers who can do exactly that. In this volume, TESOL educators from various contexts share their experiences on how they engage with critical and dialogic approaches to reimagine TESOL teacher education. Chapter authors engage with different aspects of critical and dialogic approaches to present their visions for reimagining curricula, pedagogies, online spaces, and the roles of students, teachers, and teacher educators.

Oral assessments are of vital importance to second language learners, but how can teachers and examiners best test L2 learner talk and interaction? Bringing together theory and research within the field of L2 oral proficiency, with the concept of L2 encompassing any language learned later than the early childhood years, this book provides a state-of-the art overview of what is at stake for L2 learners and examiners, and advice on how to approach testing and assessment.

Using data and findings from empirical research to illustrate and discuss key topics, Testing Talk takes the reader step-by-step through the major concepts and issues in the oral assessment of second languages, with a main focus on L2 English. Investigating and explaining the most important educational and interactional issues facing both examiners and test-takers, such as the factors which come into play during speaking tests, the differences between common test formats, and the challenge of ensuring equity in assessment, this book offers research-based advice on ways to design test tasks and in-depth insights into the assessment of L2 speaking.

Featuring a glossary of key terms and concepts, discussion questions and further reading for each chapter, and a comprehensive companion website hosting a wealth of additional materials, including authentic test recordings and assessment tasks to be used by researchers and practitioners alike, this is the only book needed in order to understand, design, and assess interactive oral L2 tests.

Assembling original contributions, this book is a pioneering attempt to address the Euro-American esoteric reception and appropriation of China.

Positioned between eighteenth-century's mesmerism and intersections with the modern martial arts current, the contributions specifically centre on nineteenth and early twentieth-century occult appraisals and representations. This book opens up an under-explored area of research in
the field of East-West interactions and the global history of religions.

This practical guide introduces students to the language and other skills needed to deliver a presentation in English. Concise and accessible, the guide will be particularly helpful to learners of English.

The book:

• covers different types of presentations, including group and online presentations, common structures of presentations, presentation tools, and the main message that each presentation should have
• introduces the language skills necessary for presentations: useful English words, phrases, and sentences to use in the various parts of presentations, and how one's pronunciation can become clearer to an international audience
• explains how to control voice and vocal tract usage and how to effectively use the body as a communicator
• discusses how to communicate with the audience, including how to handle questions, and explores different types of audiences
• includes culturally diverse examples, case studies, and exercises

Accompanied by online support material with recordings, the book is an essential guide to delivering a successful presentation in English.

This book introduces the non-specialist reader to the principal ideas, nature and purpose of social network analysis.

Social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals achieve their goals. Social network theory maps these relationships between individual actors and has become hugely influential across the social sciences.

Assuming no prior knowledge of quantitative sociology, and avoiding technicalities, this book presents the key ideas in context through examples and illustrations. Using a structured approach to understanding work in this area, John Scott signposts further reading and online sources so that readers can develop their knowledge and skills to become practitioners of this research method. A series of Frequently Asked Questions takes the reader through the main objections raised against social network analysis. The new edition updates the overview of the discipline with more recent work and current research in sociology.