Offers the study of ego-documents that figures as a prominent theme in research in the Humanities. Focusing on private letters, diaries and autobiography, this volume covers a range of different languages and historical periods, from the sixteenth century to World War I.

1. Preface & Acknowledgements; 2. Ego-documents in a historical-sociolinguistic perspective (by Wal, Marijke J. van der); 3. A lady-in-waiting's begging letter to her former employer (Paris, mid-sixteenth century) (by Lodge, R. Anthony); 4. Epistolary formulae and writing experience in Dutch letters from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (by Rutten, Gijsbert); 5. From ul to U.E.: A socio-historical study of Dutch forms of address in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century private letters (by Nobels, Judith); 6. Flat adverbs and Jane Austen's letters (by Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid); 7. Letters from Gaston B.: A prisoner's voice during the Great War (by Klippi, Carita); 8. Written documents: What they tell us about linguistic usage (by Martineau, France); 9. The rhetoric of autobiography in the seventeenth century (by Burke, Peter); 10. "All the rest ye must lade yourself": Deontic modality in sixteenth-century English merchant letters (by Nurmi, Arja); 11. Cordials and sharp satyrs: Stance and self-fashioning in eighteenth-century letters (by Sairio, Anni); 12. Self-reference and ego involvement in the 1820 Settler petition as a leaking genre (by Wlodarczyk, Matylda); 13. Ego-documents in Lithuanian: Orthographic identities at the turn of the twentieth century (by Tamosiunaite, Aurelija); 14. The language of slaves on the island of St Helena, South Atlantic, 1682-1724 (by Wright, Laura); 15. Index