The studies presented in this volume concentrate on different aspects of the medical, scientific and technical varieties of early English used in a wide range of medieval manuscripts. As the growing body of research published in recent years has shown, analysing the language of specialised texts is an opportunity to obtain access to the early history and vernacularisation of learned writing styles. It is an area of study in which all the contributors have considerable expertise, which affords them to present data findings while discussing important methodological issues. In addition, in most cases data derive from specially-designed ‘second-generation’ corpora, reflecting state-of-the-art approaches to historical linguistics, discourse analysis and pragmatics. Theoretical issues concerning the digital edition of medical and scientific texts, their role in social network analysis, and their value in the identification of dialectal specific traits are highlighted by the authors.
