Episodes
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Imagine: it's the year 1600 and you've lost your precious silver spoons, or maybe they've been stolen. Perhaps your child has a fever. Or you're facing a trial. Maybe you're looking for love or escaping a husband. What do you do?
In medieval and early modern Europe, your first port of call might have been cunning folk: practitioners of “service magic.” Neither feared (like witches), nor venerated (like saints), they were essential to daily life. For people across ages, genders, and social ranks, practical magic was a cherished resource for navigating life's many challenges.
In historian Tabitha Stanmore's beguiling account, we meet lovelorn widows, dissolute nobles, selfless healers, and renegade monks. We listen in on Queen Elizabeth I's astrology readings and track treasure hunters trying to unearth buried gold without upsetting the fairies that guard it. Much like us, premodern people lived in a bewildering world, buffeted by forces beyond their control. As Stanmore reveals, their faith in magic has much to teach about how to accommodate the irrational in our allegedly enlightened lives today.
Charming in every sense, Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic (Bloombury, 2024) is at once an immersive reconstruction of a bygone era and a thought-provoking commentary on the beauty and bafflement of being human.
Tabitha Stanmore, PhD, is a specialist in medieval and early modern magic.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
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Elizabeth Cohen, Professor Emerita at York University, joins Jana Byars to talk about her new volume, Non-Elite Women's Networks Across the Early Modern World (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), edited with Marilee Couling. Non-elite or marginalized early modern women-among them the poor, migrants, members of religious or ethnic minorities, abused or abandoned wives, servants, and sex workers-have seldom left records of their experiences. Drawing on a variety of sources, including trial records, administrative paperwork, letters, pamphlets, hagiography, and picaresque literature, this volume explores how, as social agents, these doubly invisible women built and used networks and informal alliances to supplement the usual structures of family and community that often let them down. Ten essays, ranging widely in geography from the eastern Mediterranean to colonial Spanish America and in time from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, show how flexible, sometimes ad hoc relationships could provide crucial practical and emotional support for women who faced problems of livelihood, reputation, displacement, and violence.
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Despite a mass expansion of the higher education sector in the UK since the 1960s, young people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds remain less likely to enter university than their advantaged counterparts.
Drawing on unique new research gathered from three contrasting secondary schools in England, including interviews with children from three year groups and careers advisors, Schooling Inequality: Aspirations, Opportunities and the Reproduction of Social Class (Bristol University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jessie Abrahams explores the aspirations, opportunities and experiences of young people from different social-class backgrounds against a backdrop of continuing inequalities in education.
By focusing both on the stories of young people and the schools themselves, the book sheds light on the institutional structures and practices that render young people more, or less, able to pursue their aspirations.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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The Weight of Words Series continues with Defoe's Britain (St. Augustine's Press, 2023), as historian Jeremy Black uses this writer to interpret Britain in the late 1600s, and likewise looks to the times to interpret the fiction. As seen in previous studies on Christie, Smollett, Fielding, and the Gothic novelists, Black tells the story of the story-teller, and presents the picture of British nationalism that "was the product, history, and record of struggle--collective and individual--as well as its defence. Defoe provides particular accounts of this struggle, both in foreign seas and lands, and at home. This struggle had a moral character that is difficult to capture today."
Defoe was an outsider, a man of many interests whom Black asserts evades too precise a portrait or coherent description of character and career. But he is a traveler, in the literal and imaginative senses, and in his engagement with life and its issues and willingness to associate with 'low-life' prefigures later literary giants like Smollett and Fielding. More than the establishment of genre, Defoe created the writer "whose business is observation." Black's account of this parcel of the British past is impeccable because it is in fact an account that the past, in Defoe, gives of itself. "As a writer, Defoe brought together a reality usually presented as, and endorsed by, history, with the imaginative focus of storytelling, and the direction of, variously, propaganda, analysis, and exemplary tale."
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Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Ella van Hest (Ghent University, Belgium) about her ethnographic research related to language diversity at an abortion clinic in Belgium. The conversation focusses on a co-authored paper entitled Language policy at an abortion clinic published in Language Policy in 2023.
For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.
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Childhood as lived during the French Third Republic was very different from childhood during the modern era. Working-class children laboured alongside adults in the home, on the streets, and in places of work. French authorities sought to change this and redefine childhood by means of government organizations, separate legal structures, and schools for delinquent children. French authorities visited places of work, schools, and interviewed parents. Yet gender based divisions between males and females were still reinforced.
Professor Sachs was an assistant professor of history at Texas State University and will start as assistant professor with Texas A & M next year. In her latest publication, An Age to Work: Working Class Childhood in Third Republic Paris (Oxford University Press, 2023), Professor Sachs uses police reports, records of interviews, and postcards to explore the history of working class children in Paris. Dr. Sachs received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2017. Prior to coming to Texas State, she taught at William & Mary and Denison University.
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Friars are often overlooked in the picture of health care in late mediaeval England. Physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, barbers, midwives - these are the people we think of immediately as agents of healing; whilst we identify university teachers as authorities on medical writings. Yet from their first appearance in England in the 1220s to the dispersal of the friaries in the 1530s, four orders of friars were active as healers of every type. Their care extended beyond the circle of their own brethren: patients included royalty, nobles and bishops, and they also provided charitable aid and relief to the poor. They wrote about medicine too. Bartholomew the Englishman and Roger Bacon were arguably the most influential authors, alongside the Dominican Henry Daniel. Nor should we forget the anonymous Franciscan compilers of the Tabula medicine, a handbook of cures, which, amongst other items, contains case histories of friars practising medicine. Even after the Reformation, these texts continued to circulate and find new readers amongst practitioners and householders.The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) by Peter Murray Jones restores friars to their rightful place in the history of English health care, exploring the complex, productive entanglement between care of the soul and healing of the body, in both theoretical and practical terms. Drawing upon the surprising wealth of evidence found in the surviving manuscripts, it brings to light individuals such as William Holme (c. 1400), and his patient the duke of York (d. 1402), who suffered from swollen legs. Holme also wrote about medicinal simples and gave instructions for dealing with eye and voice problems experienced by his brother Franciscans. Friars from the thirteenth century onwards wrote their medicine differently, reflecting their religious vocation as preachers and confessors.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
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Shahmima Akhtar is a historian of race, migration and empire and an assistant professor of Black and Asian British History at the University of Birmingham. She previously worked at the Royal Historical Society to improve BME representation in UK History, whether working with schools and the curriculum, cultural institutions, community groups or other learned societies. Dr. Akhtar has also worked closely with museums and heritage sites as a researcher and consultant on shaping histories of the British Empire for today’s populace.
In this interview, she discusses her new book, Exhibiting Irishness: Empire, Race and Nation, c. 1850-1970 (Manchester UP, 2024), which studies differing visions of Irish racial identities as displayed at various international fairs and expos.
Exhibiting Irishness analyses how exhibitions enabled Irish individuals and groups to work out (privately and publicly) their politicised existences across two centuries. As a cultural history of Irish identity, the book considers exhibitions as a formative platform for imagining a host of Irish pasts, presents and futures. Fair organisers responded to the contexts of famine and poverty, migration and diasporic settlement, independence movements and partition, as well as post-colonial nation building. Exhibiting Irishness demonstrates how Irish businesses and labourers, the elite organisers of the fairs and successive Irish governments curated Irishness. The central malleability of Irish identity on display emerged in tandem with the unfolding of Ireland's political transformation from a colony of the British Empire, a migrant community in the United States, to a divided Ireland in the form of the Republic and Northern Ireland.
Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University
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What exactly is capitalism? How has the meaning of capitalism changed over time? And what’s at stake in our understanding or misunderstanding of it? In Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word (Princeton UP, 2022), Michael Sonenscher examines the history behind the concept and pieces together the range of subjects bound up with the word. Sonenscher shows that many of our received ideas fail to pick up the work that the idea of capitalism is doing for us, without us even realizing it.
“Capitalism” was first coined in France in the early nineteenth century. It began as a fusion of two distinct sets of ideas. The first involved thinking about public debt and war finance. The second involved thinking about the division of labour. Sonenscher shows that thinking about the first has changed radically over time. Funding welfare has been added to funding warfare, bringing many new questions in its wake. Thinking about the second set of ideas has offered far less room for manoeuvre. The division of labour is still the division of labour and the debates and discussions that it once generated have now been largely forgotten. By exploring what lay behind the earlier distinction before it collapsed and was eroded by the passage of time, Sonenscher shows why the present range of received ideas limits our political options and the types of reform we might wish for.
Michael Sonenscher is a fellow of King's College, University of Cambridge. His books include Sans-Culottes and Before the Deluge (both Princeton UP).
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
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During the fourteenth century in Western Europe, there was a growing interest in imitating the practices of a group of hermits known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Laypeople and religious alike learned about their rituals not only through readings from the Vitae Patrum (Lives of the Desert Fathers) and sermons but also through the images that brought their stories to life.
In Illuminating the Vitae Patrum: The Lives of Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Denva Gallant examines the Morgan Library’s richly illustrated manuscript of the Vitae Patrum (MS M.626), whose extraordinary artworks witness the rise of the eremitic ideal and its impact on the visual culture of late mediaeval Italy. Drawing upon scholarship on the history of psychology, eastern monasticism, gender, and hagiography, Dr. Gallant deepens our understanding of the centrality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers to late mediaeval piety. She provides important insights into the role of images in making the practices of the desert saints both compelling and accessible to fourteenth-century city dwellers, who were just beginning to cultivate the habit of private devotion on a wide scale.
By focusing on the most extensively illuminated manuscript of the Vitae Patrum to emerge during the trecento, this book sheds new light on the ways in which images communicated and reinforced modes of piety. It will be of interest to art historians, religious historians, and students focusing on this period in Italian history.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Every Tudor Queen had ladies-in-waiting. They were her confidantes and her chaperones. Only the Queen's ladies had the right to enter her most private chambers, spending hours helping her to get dressed and undressed, caring for her clothes and jewels, listening to her secrets. But they also held a unique power. A quiet word behind the scenes, an appropriately timed gift, a well-negotiated marriage alliance were all forms of political agency wielded expertly by women.
The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens (W. W. Norton, 2024) by Dr. Nicola Clark explores the daily lives of ladies-in-waiting, revealing the secrets of recruitment, costume, what they ate, where (and with whom) they slept. We meet María de Salinas, who travelled to England with Catherine of Aragon when just a teenager and spied for her during the divorce from Henry VIII. Anne Boleyn's lady-in-waiting Jane Parker was instrumental in the execution of not one, but two queens. And maid-of-honour Anne Basset kept her place through the last four consorts, negotiating the conflicting loyalties of her birth family, her mistress the Queen, and even the desires of the King himself. As Henry changed wives, and changed the very fabric of the country's structure besides, these women had to make choices about loyalty that simply didn't exist before. The Waiting Game is the first time their vital story has been told.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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In 2012, to stave off the collapse of their currency union, Europe’s leaders sought to end the so-called “doom loop” between the solvency of their governments and their banking systems. Two years later, a banking union was born.
Created as a crisis response, like the postwar coal and steel community, this ten-year-old union is another step in Europe’s long integrationist road. Yet – as Nicolas Véron points out in Europe’s Banking Union At Ten: Unfinished Yet Transformative (Bruegel, 2024) - the effort to "break the vicious circle between banks and sovereigns remains fragile and incomplete".
Together with Jean Pisani-Ferry, Nicolas Véron is a co-founder of the Bruegel public-policy think tank in Brussels and a scholar at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) in Washington. A specialist in financial systems and regulatory reform, he is an alumnus of the École Polytechnique and the École nationale supérieure des mines in Paris and - until 2000 - was a French civil servant. He has written and co-written many papers on banking supervision, crisis management, and Eurozone policy governance.
*The author's book recommendations were Central Banking Before 1800: A Rehabilitation by Ulrich Bindseil (OUP, 2020) and 7500 Euros: Pastiches politico-littéraires by David Spector (Wombat, 2022).
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack.
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Simon Heffer's book Sing As We Go: Britain Between the Wars (Penguin, 2024) is an astonishingly ambitious overview of the political, social and cultural history of the country from 1919 to 1939.
It explores and explains the politics of the period, and puts such moments of national turmoil as the General Strike of 1926 and the Abdication Crisis of 1936 under the microscope. It offers pen portraits of the era's most significant figures. It traces the changing face of Britain as cars made their first mass appearance, the suburbs sprawled, and radio and cinema became the means of mass entertainment. And it probes the deep divisions that split the nation: between the haves and have-nots, between warring ideological factions, and between those who promoted accommodation with fascism in Europe and those who bitterly opposed it.
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Contemporary Europe seems to be divided between progressive cosmopolitans sympathetic to the European Union and the ideals of the Enlightenment, and counter-enlightened conservative nationalists extolling the virtues of homelands threatened by globalised elites and mass migration.
Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past (Cambridge UP, 2023) seeks to uncover the roots of historically informed ideas of Europe, while at the same time underlining the fundamental differences between the writings of the older counter-revolutionary Europeanists and their self-appointed successors and detractors in the twenty-first century. In the decades around 1800, the era of the French Revolution, counter-revolutionary authors from all over Europe defended European civilisation against the onslaught of nationalist revolutionaries, bent on the destruction of the existing order, or so they believed. In opposition to the new revolutionary world of universal and abstract principles, the counter-revolutionary publicists proclaimed the concept of a gradually developing European society and political order, founded on a set of historical and - ultimately divine - institutions that had guaranteed Europe's unique freedom, moderation, diversity, and progress since the fall of the Roman Empire. These counter-revolutionary Europeanists drew on the cosmopolitan Enlightenment and simultaneously criticized its alleged revolutionary legacy. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these ideas of European history and civilisation were rediscovered and adapted to new political contexts, shaping in manifold ways our contested idea of European history and memory until today.
Matthijs Lok, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, Universiteit van Amsterdam
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
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Why did England's one experiment in republican rule fail?
Oliver Cromwell's death in 1658 sparked a period of unrivalled turmoil and confusion in English history. In less than two years, there were close to ten changes of government; rival armies of Englishmen faced each other across the Scottish border; and the Long Parliament was finally dissolved after two decades. Why was this period so turbulent, and why did the republic, backed by a formidable standing army, come crashing down in such spectacular fashion?
In The Fall: The Last Days of the English Republic (Yale UP, 2024), Henry Reece explores the full story of the English republic's downfall. Questioning the accepted version of events, Reece argues that the restoration of the monarchy was far from inevitable--and that the republican regime could have survived long term. Richard Cromwell's Protectorate had deep roots in the political nation, the Rump Parliament mobilised its supporters impressively, and the country showed little interest in returning to the old order until the republic had collapsed. This is a compelling account that transforms our understanding of England's short-lived period of republican rule.
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Even in adversity, Catholics exercised considerable agency in post-Reformation Utrecht. Through the political practices of repression and toleration, Utrecht’s magistrates, under constant pressure from the Reformed Church, attempted to exclude Catholics from the urban public sphere. However, by mobilising their social status and networks, Catholic Utrechters created room to live as pious Catholics and honourable citizens, claiming more rights in the public sphere through their spatial practices and in discourses of self-representation.
Catholic Survival in the Dutch Republic: Agency in Coexistence and the Public Sphere in Utrecht, 1620-1672 (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) by Dr. Genji Yasuhira explores how Catholic priests and laypeople cooperated and managed to survive the Reformed regime by participating in a communal process of delimiting the public, continuing to rely on the mediaeval legacy and adapting to early modern religious diversity. Deploying their own understandings of publicness, Catholic Utrechters not only enabled their survival in the city and the Catholic revival in the Dutch Republic but also contributed to shaping a multi-religious society in the Northern Netherlands.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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T&T Clark Handbook of Neo-Calvinism (T&T Clark, 2023) comprehensively demonstrates neo-Calvinism's unique contribution to theology and Christian philosophy. It offers excellent contributions on the movement's most important historical and thematic loci, including its impact on Reformed denominations and churches across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Divided into 3 sections, this handbook first surveys the entire landscape of the neo-Calvinist movement as it pertains to key theological topics. These loci, which range from revelation and Scripture to Christology and theological ethics, show that neo-Calvinist theologies are uniquely modern and yet typically confessional. The second section discusses the influence of key figures from the first and second generation of neo-Calvinist thought, including both principal figures like Abraham Kuyper and lesser known thinkers like August Lecerf. The final section charts the legacy of neo-Calvinism, in non-Dutch geographies, for other sciences, and for the church.
Cory Brock is the minister at St Columbas Free Church of Scotland in Edinburgh and part-time lecturer in Systematic Theology and Preaching at Edinburgh Theological Seminary. He is the author of Orthodox Yet Modern: Herman Bavinck's Use of Friedrich Schleiermacher (Lexham Press 2020).
Nathaniel Gray Sutanto is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, Washington, USA. He is the author of God and Knowledge: Herman Bavinck's Theological Epistemology (T&T Clark, 2020).
Brock and Sutanto also coauthored Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction (Lexham Academic Press 2022). Listeners can find that interview here.
Listeners interested in topically related NBN interviews, should listen to Zach McCulley's interview with James Eglinton on Bavinck: A Critical Biography and Justin McGeary's interviews with Bruce Pass on The Heart of Dogmatics: Christology and Christocentrism in Herman Bavinck and On Theology: Herman Bavinck's Theological Orations.
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Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Harry McCarthy provides a new approach to the study of early modern boy actors, offering a historical re-appraisal of these performers' physical skills in order to reassess their wide-reaching contribution to early modern theatrical culture. Ranging across drama performed from the 1580s to the 1630s by all-boy and adult companies alike, the book argues that the exuberant physicality fostered in boy performers across the early modern repertory shaped not only their own performances, but how and why plays were written for them in the first place. Dr. McCarthy's ground-breaking approach to boy performance draws on detailed analysis of a wide range of plays, thorough interrogation of the cultural contexts in which they were written and performed, and present-day practice-based research, offering a critical reimagining of this important and unique facet of early modern theatrical culture.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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In the early modern era, seemingly impossible stories of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft were common and believable. The important question of the time was not if these things happened, but why. This was particularly true as the rise of Protestantism began to challenge Catholic beliefs in miracles and continued to be the case even after scientific research began to supplant religious belief in these phenomena.
In They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale UP, 2023), Carlos Eire shows how these events were an accepted component of early modern life. Based on firsthand accounts, Eire explores the stories of St. Teresa of Avila, St. Joseph of Cupertino, the Venerable María de Ágreda, and others, to describe a world animated by a different understanding of the natural and supernatural. Eire examines why and how cultural, historical, religious, and scientific contexts plays a role in defining both the possible and the impossible.
Recommended reading:
Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred &
How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else
both by Jeffrey J. Kripal.
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Red Secularism: Socialism and Secularist Culture in Germany 1890 to 1933 (Cambridge UP, 2023) is the first substantive investigation into one of the key sources of radicalism in modern German, the subculture that arose at the intersection of secularism and socialism in the late nineteenth-century. It explores the organizations that promoted their humanistic-monistic worldview through popular science and asks how this worldview shaped the biographies of ambitious self-educated workers and early feminists. Todd H. Weir shows how generations of secularist intellectuals staked out leading positions in the Social Democratic Party, but often lost them due to their penchant for dissent.
Moving between local and national developments, this book examines the crucial role of red secularism in the political struggles over religion that rocked Germany and fed into the National Socialist dictatorship of 1933. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
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