Covering nearly one thousand years, this volume explores medieval and modern English texts from fresh perspectives. Within the relatively new field of historical discourse linguistics, the synchronic analysis of large textual units and consideration of text-external features in relation to discourse has so far received little attention. To fill that gap, this volume offers studies of medieval instructional and religious texts and correspondence from the early modern period. The contributions highlight writer-audience relationships, the intended use of texts, descriptions of text-type, and questions of orality and manuscript contextualization. The topics, ranging from the reception of Old English texts to the conventions of practical instruction in Middle English to the epistolary construction of science in early Modern English, are directly relevant to historical linguists, discourse and text linguists, and students of the history of English.

Patrick Studer, University of Limerick, Ireland, in the Journal of Historical Pragmatics Vol. 7:1 (2006):
[...] all authors contribute to historical linguistics in more than one respect: First, they present new findings for the specific subject areas discussed in their chapters; secondly, they offer suggestions and generalisations regarding the discourse colony, text-type or genre under scrutiny; and thirdly, the authors directly or indirectly raise methodological issues for future studies of their topics. Seen as a whole, the book has pioneering spirit in that it names and outlines central problems with which historical linguistics today is faced. These problems range from difficulties of contextualisation to issues of systematic analysis of data.