Foreign titles

I don't know if I ever mentioned the Bulgarian edition on this blog:

But now I can't allow the Chinese edition to go unmentioned:

Can't help wondering what language (if any) might be next.

Second edition

My advance copy of the second edition arrived by post a few days ago. It will be generally available from July.

The new edition is about 40 pages longer than the first edition. What, you ask, are the major changes?

Well, in the publisher's words the changes to the new edition include "bringing the story right up to today" (well, up to June 2011: once the typescript has been delivered it's difficult to make any major changes or additions).

There is also "fresh coverage of immigration, multiculturalism, and the resurgence of nationalism in the Low Countries" — something touched on very briefly in the first edition (finished in 2005), but developed at more length here (still modest length: it has to fit in with 2000 years of other history).

The new edition "outlines the countries' recent economic successes and failures". "Recent" meaning since 1973, I suppose, and do bear in mind that this really is an outline, a sketch as it were.

The book now "includes a new list of political parties and governments since 1918", something which was lacking from the first edition. If it really is a lack. How important is it to a reader to have such a thing? Still, hopefully somebody somewhere will find it useful, and the main purpose it to unburden the prose by packing the party-political developments into a tabular format.

There's also (unmentioned by the publisher) new material on popular entertainment. New in the sense that it wasn't in the first edition: it's about the decades immediately after the Second World War.

The first edition was copy edited and printed in Britain. The new edition was copy edited in India and printed in China. I suppose I shouldn't cavil: without such savings they might not have thought another edition of my work was worth the expense.

A Dutch trade mission to China

This was the topic of my contribution to a recently published book on The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks.

What particularly interested me was not so much the mission itself, as the way that the report of it published a decade later was co-opted in different ways by certain Catholics in both Antwerp and Amsterdam as a way of giving a more positive spin to the activities of Jesuit missions in China.

That report, it must be said, was not only compendious, but also copiously and beautifully illustrated.

This just out

Manchester University Press have just brought out the latest volume in the "Britain and the Netherlands" series (as it used to be known - I'm not sure it still functions as a series). The title is Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c. 1570 - 1720.

The volume contains papers from a conference held in Amsterdam and Leiden in late 2006 - among them a piece by me about how the Southern Netherlands (now Belgium) functioned as the prime point of contact and support in Counter-Reformation Europe for Catholic minorities of Britain and the Netherlands. Most of the other essays deal more with the internal (political, social, devotional) affairs of the Dutch and British Catholic communities.