This volume brings together a selection of pivotal articles published in the hundred years since the launch of the journal Neophilologus. Each article is accompanied by an up-to-date commentary written by former and current editors of the journal. The commentaries position the articles within the history of the journal in particular and within the field of Modern Language Studies in general. As such, this book not only outlines the history of a scholarly journal, but also the history of an entire field. Over the course of its first one hundred years, 1916 to 2016, Neophilologus: An International Journal of Modern and Mediaeval Language and Literature has developed from a modest quarterly set up by a group of young and ambitious Dutch professors as a platform for their own publications to one of the leading international journals in Modern Language Studies. Although Neophilologus has remained broad in scope, multilingual and multidisciplinary, it has witnessed dramatic changes in its long-standing history: paradigm shifts, the rise and fall of literary theories, methods and sub-disciplines, as has the field of Modern Language Studies itself.

In The Golden Mean of Languages, Alisa van de Haar sheds new light on the debates regarding the form and status of the vernacular in the early modern Low Countries, where both Dutch and French were local tongues. The fascination with the history, grammar, spelling, and vocabulary of Dutch and French has been studied mainly from monolingual perspectives tracing the development towards modern Dutch or French. Van de Haar shows that the discussions on these languages were rooted in multilingual environments, in particular in French schools, Calvinist churches, printing houses, and chambers of rhetoric. The proposals that were formulated there to forge Dutch and French into useful forms were not directed solely at uniformization but were much more diverse.

In this volume, scholars from different disciplines – Old English and Anglo-Latin literature and linguistics, palaeography, history, runology, numismatics and archaeology – explore what are here called ‘micro-texts’, i.e. very short pieces of writing constituting independent, self-contained texts. For the first time, these micro-texts are here studied in their forms and communicative functions, their pragmatics and performativity.

The first handbook to survey and expand the burgeoning field of corpus pragmatics, the intersection of pragmatics and corpus linguistics.