The chapters in this volume investigate how visual and material features of early English books, documents, and other artefacts support - or potentially contradict - the linguistic features in communicating the message. In addition to investigating how such communication varies between different media and genres, our contributors propose novel methods for analysing these features, including new digital applications. They map the use of visual and material features - such as layout design or choice of script/typeface - against linguistic features - such as code-switching, lexical variation, or textual labels - to consider how these choices reflect the communicative purposes of the text, for example guiding readers to navigate the text in a certain way.

Transforming Early English shows how historical pragmatics can offer a powerful explanatory framework for the changes medieval English and Older Scots texts undergo, as they are transmitted over time and space. The book argues that formal features such as spelling, script and font, and punctuation - often neglected in critical engagement with past texts - relate closely to dynamic, shifting socio-cultural processes, imperatives and functions. This theme is illustrated through numerous case-studies in textual recuperation, ranging from the reinvention of Old English poetry and prose in the later medieval and early modern periods, to the eighteenth-century 'vernacular revival' of literature in Older Scots.

This multidisciplinary volume offers new insights into the development of genres of medical discourse in changing socio-cultural contexts.

Reading English Verse in Manuscript, c.1350-c.1500 is the first book-length history of reading for later Middle English poetry. While much past work in the history of reading has revolved around marginalia, this book consults a wider range of evidence, from the weights of books in medieval bindings to relationships between rhyme and syntax. It combines literary-critical close readings, detailed case studies of particular surviving codices, and systematic manuscript surveys drawing on continental European traditions of quantitative codicology to demonstrate the variety, vitality, and formal concerns visible in the reading of verse in this period. The small-and large-scale formal features of poetry affected reading subtly but extensively, determining how readers might move through books and even shaping physical books themselves. Readers' responses to one formal feature, rhyme, meanwhile, evince a habitual but therefore deep-rooted formalism which can support and enhance close readings today. Reading English Verse in Manuscript sheds fresh light on poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve, but also shows how their works were read in manuscript in the context of a much larger mass of anonymous poems that influenced canonical poems, in a pattern of mutual influence.

This volume provides a diachronic and synchronic overview of linguistic variability and change in involved, speech-related and spoken texts in English. While previous works on the topic have focused on more limited time periods, this book covers data from the 16th century up to the present day. The studies offer new insights into historical and present-day corpus pragmatics by identifying and exploring features of orality in a variety of registers. For readers who are new to the field, the range of approaches will provide a helpful overview; for readers who are already familiar with the field, the volume will shed light on the complexity of factors such as register, sociolinguistic variability and language attitude, thus making it a useful resource and stepping stone for further exploration. The volume celebrates the groundbreaking contributions of Professor Merja Kytö in making accessible speech-related corpus material and leading the way in its exploration.

The Tudors are one of the most well-known and powerful dynasties in English history. How they constructed and maintained their social magnificence and status, against a background of political upheaval, has fascinated people for centuries. This book argues that Tudor royal power was, to a large degree, textual. By examining examples of correspondence alongside lesser-studied texts such as proclamations and historical chronicles, the book explores the material and linguistic practices that came to symbolise monarchic authority in the Tudor era, and provides fascinating insights into well-known figures including Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. Mel Evans applies contemporary sociolinguistic and pragmatic concepts, as well as methods developed in corpus linguistics, to map out the textual similarities across the sixteenth century that highlight this symbolic 'royal voice', crucial to the power and might of the Tudor dynasty.

Studies of digital communication technologies often focus on the apparently unique set of multimodal resources afforded to users and the development of innovative linguistic strategies for performing mediatised identities and maintaining online social networks. This edited volume interrogates the novelty of such practices by establishing a transhistorical approach to the study of digital communication. The transhistorical approach explores language practices as lived experiences grounded in historical contexts, and aims to identify those elements of human behaviour that transcend historical boundaries, looking beyond specific developments in communication technologies to understand the enduring motivations and social concerns that drive human communication. The volume reveals long-term patterns in the indexical functions of seemingly innovative written and multimodal resources and the ideologies that underpin them, and shows that methods are not necessarily contingent on their datasets: historical analytic frameworks can be applied to digital data and newer approaches used to understand historical data. These insights present exciting opportunities for English language researchers, both historical and modern.