This collection of uniformly strong studies brings a contemporary, sophisticated understanding of social roles, positions and identities to historical written texts, and so raises new and exciting questions on the ways in which writing, early on, became a vehicle for articulating more than ideas and stories - how writing became an instrument for endorsing, questioning and challenging the social order.

- Jan Blommaert, Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization, Director, Babylon Center, Tilburg University,

This is a trailblazing volume. Too often do studies in historical linguistics adopt social (or other) theories of yesterday. But here we have cutting-edge research on social roles, identities and practices applied innovatively to historical data, leading to new insights – not just about Late Modern English but also about the dynamics of language, social phenomena and change – and lighting the way for future research.

- Jonathan Culpeper, Senior Lecturer, English Language and Linguistics, Lancaster University,

Adopting a research model from the social sciences, this volume offers a challenging new framework for the study of Late Modern English writings both from the public and the private domain. Uniquely in the context of historical sociolinguistics, the papers included offer important insights into the interrelationship of different social roles adopted by Late Modern English writers and their language use. Each paper provides the reader with an intriguing case study, showing convincingly that data from older stages of the language, despite obvious limitations as deriving from the written medium, are in fact very good data when approached with a research model that takes these limitations into account through consistent and systematic embedding in the context in which the texts were originally conceived.

- Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Professor of English, Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics,