Overview

This book outlines major trends in language use by early modern diplomats, mainly in the European context, through a series of case studies and overviews of regional diplomatic traditions. During the early modern period, linguistic practices in European diplomacy changed drastically, as the decline of Latin and German as diplomatic languages paved the way for the rise of French as a pan-European medium of diplomacy. While it was no secret that French was the dominant language of European elites during the eighteenth century, surprisingly little is known about the way this cultural trend translated into a major linguistic shift in diplomacy. This volume offers a broader perspective, tracking these changes throughout the early modern period. Spanning three centuries and extending across and beyond continental Europe, the contributors map the pace, the mechanisms, the reasons and the limits for changes in the use of languages in early modern diplomacy and explore the linguistic practices of diplomats as an indicator of wider social, cultural, and political changes. A novel study of European diplomacy and linguistic interactions, this book will be of interest to historians, in particular those working on language practices in diplomacy and the social history of languages. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 licence.

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Gleb Kazakov is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Eastern European History, Historical Institute, Justus Liebig University of Gießen, Germany. He is the author of Die Moskauer Strelitzen-Revolte 1682: diplomatische Spionage, Nachrichtenverkehr und Narrativentransfer zwischen Russland und Europa (Stuttgart, 2021) (The Moscow streltsy revolt of 1682: Diplomatic espionage, circulation of news and transfer of narratives between Russia and Europe). Vladislav Rjéoutski is Gerda Henkel Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Paris, France, he served as principal investigator of the DFG-funded research project on the languages of diplomacy in eighteenth-century Russia. He is co-author (with Derek Offord and Gesine Argent) of The French Language in Russia: A Social, Political, Cultural, and Literary History (2018).

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