In this chapter, we address some ways in which the use of corpora has revolutionised the study of the history of English. We first account for the development of historical corpora of English and discuss advantages and drawbacks associated with different corpus sizes. We also address types of language use that are not well represented in existing corpora, potential clashes between comparability and representativity, and features such as tagging and spelling normalisation. We then consider contributions that historical corpora have made to specific linguistic fields, notably in variationist studies, historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics, and illustrate historical corpus methodology by presenting a case study on sentence-initial and in Late Modern English based on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). We conclude the chapter with a list of desiderata for future corpus-based research on the history of the English language.

This chapter examines courtroom documents, focusing on trials and depositions, which offer glimpses of spoken language of the past. Trials written in English, often in the form of questions and answers, are rare before the late sixteenth century. Depositions, the oral testimony of a witness recorded by a scribe prior to trial and used as evidence, become more available in English from the mid sixteenth century. Trials and depositions exist as manuscripts, contemporaneous printed texts and later printed editions, and have recently become accessible through corpora and modern linguistic editions. Manuscripts (already one step beyond the original speech event) are less susceptible to interference by editors, printers and so on, but even these texts should not be treated as verbatim records. Nevertheless, the texts supply valuable data for researchers taking historical pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches and/or examining linguistic variation and change, and in a wide range of other areas.

In this chapter, I argue for the importance of two models in explorations of orality in the history of English: communicative immediacy and ‘oral/conversational diagnostics’, within the framework of oral vs. literate/production styles. Based on the two models, I identify certain (sub)registers and genres as reference points for assessing the nature of orality reflected in historical linguistic data. In addition, I use the major conclusions of the ‘bad’ data debate, foundational for historical pragmatics, as a springboard for a selective survey of research focused on interjections, speech acts, and specific discourse domains and genres such as wills, courtroom discourse and letters. Potential directions for future research and new data sources are also provided to indicate gaps in the coverage of historical oralities in English.

What is the best way to assess the role of religion in nineteenth-century India? Should it be defined by texts? Rituals and religious practice? Reform movements? Distinctive histories of each religious community? Given how multi-faceted religious experience has been and continues to be in India, the question compels no easy answer. Also, given the numerous nationalist uses of nominally religious symbols and references, the importance of defining its historical contours and boundaries has become only more prominent in recent years. Outside simplistic models of nationalism, communalism, or political ideologies that use religion as a rallying cry, how do we begin to understand the role of religion in modern Indian history? If we start with Shashi Tharoor, a prominent public intellectual, one answer would be an affirmative celebration of being Hindu, based on a notion of Hinduism as a transcendental philosophy.1 If one looks elsewhere, such as to the rich world of Dalit and anti-caste activism, what sorts of answers would we find to that question? Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, another public intellectual, would answer that religion in India cannot be imagined outside of caste, hierarchy, and violence.2

These works both generated a fair amount of press in the various public spheres of India and raised questions for any student of religion in India. Is Hinduism, as Tharoor claims, a “tolerant” religion? When viewed from the history of religions, how shall Hinduism be distinguished from the various appropriations of it in the guise of Hindu nationalism?

After underlining the importance and currency of the topic of leadership, the introduction of the volume sets out to explain the content and merits of the present volume. The chapters of the volume make significant contributions to the following topics: (a) the vocabulary of ancient leadership: the authors study terms and concepts related to leadership in several ancient civilisations (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Iran, Israel, China, Greece, Rome, and the Late Roman Empire), providing clarifications as to their different nuances; (b) the diverse forms of leadership: the essays of the volume deal with good and bad leaders, intellectual and political leaders, imperial and local, thus highlighting the complexity of the phenomenon of leadership in antiquity; (c) theoretical reflections on leadership: the analysis proposed enables readers to trace elements of leadership theory in ancient civilisations. The merits of this investigation consist in encouraging a comparative reflection on ancient civilisations and in triggering also a critical reflection on modern leadership issues.

Chapter 1 retraces the history of the critical reception of Hegel’s social and political thought, from the publication of the Philosophy of Right to the present. The chapter discusses the charges of conservatism raised by Hegel’s first critics, the liberal rehabilitation of his work in the second half of the twentieth century and the communitarian interpretation introduced in British and American debates from the 1980s. Finally, the chapter focuses on the ‘middle ground’ approach favoured today by most Hegelian scholars, based on a compromise between the liberal and the communitarian positions. This kind of interpretation is undoubtedly a step forward from the one-sided approach of many previous readings. However, by favouring the practical dimension of Hegel’s arguments over their logical or metaphysical foundations (an attitude referred to as methodological pragmatism) and by regarding the social dimension of freedom as an adjective rather than a substantive component of his position (an attitude referred to as structural individualism), this interpretative trend ends up reiterating the liberal framework Hegel seeks to transcend.

For many generations, Indian historians have grappled with the importance of Rammohan Roy (1774–1833) (Figure 1.1) within the histories of print journalism, prose literature, and religious reform in early-nineteenth-century Bengal. For some, he is the “father of modern India,” the progenitor of reforms and progress in these areas, a “Universal Man,” a father of “new learning,” given his emphasis on English-language and Western-style debate, discourse, and thought. For other historians of India, he was a tool of imperial power, who constantly sang the praises of the English Company. World historians have seen him as an Indian-style French revolutionary and, in recent parlance, as a constitutional liberal.

When religion enters the picture, many assess his work according to the success or failure of his various ideas and critiques regarding religion. Rather than approach his writings and intellectual labors through a measure of failure or success from the perspective of post-1830s India, this chapter explores the precise nature of those ideas about religion and the institutions nurtured in the wake of those ideas, with a view toward understanding the significance of his work in the history of religions. Building on the recent work of Brian Hatcher, who emphasizes Rammohan's relationship to polity building and political life, I place him in a history of religion as opposed to a history of nationalism, liberalism, or empire. Questions about universal religion, true religion, and revealed religion, as well as demarcating lines between what constitutes religion and what constitutes a space outside of religion, have animated historical actors within a variety of traditions since at least the seventeenth century.

The chapter considers the nature of lexical borrowing and the challenges of identifying the contribution that it has made to the lexicon of English. It looks at the major sources of data, especially historical dictionaries. It considers the importance of identifying by whom a word is used, and in which contexts. It also examines phenomena of discontinuity and multiple inputs in the histories of words, and the challenges that these present for constructing linear histories of English words, and larger-scale narratives of the history of the lexicon.

This chapter examines key features of the language of print newspapers in Britain from the founding of the London Gazette in 1665 up until the present day. It describes significant milestones in the history of English newspapers, outlining major socio-historical, economic, cultural and technological developments which have had an impact on the emergence, diversification and professionalisation of this important mass medium. After an overview of the major subgenres found in these multi-text conglomerates – news, opinion and advertising – the focus is on news reports. The chapter outlines how the chronological mode of reporting news preferred in the first two hundred years of newspapers gave way to the inverted pyramid style of news narration, subsequently abandoned for more flexible models like the package approach in modern news discourse. Furthermore, this chapter provides insights into contemporary journalistic ideals and practices employed in positioning the paper and balancing information density and readership appeal.

As is commonly known, both Ptolemaic and Seleucid rulers in the wake of Alexander the Great claimed divine worship. This phenomenon was also reflected in ancient Jewish literature. In the first part, this chapter aims at describing the time of Antiochus IV (175–164 bc) as the historical framework in which a specific confrontation with the Hellenistic ruler ideology is evident. In the second part, the chapter uses 2 Macc 9 (‘the death of Antiochus IV’) and the Book of Judith as examples as to how selected deuterocanonical writings (e.g. 2 Maccabees and Judith) have dealt with the encounter with the Hellenic ruler cult in a narrative discourse. Both cases demonstrate God’s help and power, which becomes obvious through the cruel death of the ruler who claimed for himself divinity.

Practices of literacy have changed over the centuries, these changes all relating – in Richard Hoggart’s famous formulation (1957) – to the ‘uses of literacy’. As a result, the written texts surviving from the medieval period demand careful qualitative analysis of the linguistic data they supply so that they can be appropriately assessed. In this chapter, the focus is on a key set of early witnesses for the history of English: the ‘documentary’ texts that survive in large numbers from the Old and Middle English periods. Such texts survive in various formats and contexts, and in each case close examination of the modes of presentation adopted reveals not only the sociocultural functions these texts were intended to perform, but also their validity as witnesses for the history of the language. A broad view is taken of what is meant by a ‘documentary’ text, including not only such artefacts as letters, charters and wills but also glosses and inscriptions. Witnesses examined in this chapter include vernacular inscriptions on stone, metal or bone, Old English glosses and late medieval English letters. These texts were all created within complex discourse communities, and that complexity requires deep engagement with the particular circumstances of individual textual production.

The Introduction to Volume II begins by situating the volume within the New Cambridge History of the English Language. The topics of documentation, sources of data and modelling are then introduced. Part I addresses aspects of the textual record and its documentation, from inscriptions via manuscripts and prints to computerised corpora; special attention is paid to the relationship between speech and writing and to diachronic aspects of the English lexicon. Part II focuses on three key works or authors that have been central sources of data in historical studies: Beowulf, Chaucer and Shakespeare. Part III provides detailed accounts of a selection of text categories and their value as sources of data, including a chapter dedicated to texts by women, who are underrepresented in the historical record. Part IV, finally, discusses several important theoretical and methodological approaches to modelling historical language data, including generative, functional, cognitive and psycholinguistic approaches as well as construction grammar, grammaticalisation and advanced statistical treatments. Connections between aspects of the documented historical record, the data scholars can retrieve from it, and the models they apply to their data are highlighted.

This chapter provides an overview of the language of religious texts in Old, Middle and Early Modern English. We divide religious language into three spheres: Bible language, the language of prayers and the language of texts of religious instruction and discussion. We then discuss the language of religious texts against the background of the impact of the language of the vernacular Bible, particularly before 1500. We argue that, prior to the publication of the King James Bible, there was no specific ‘religious register’ in Old and Middle English, and even in Early Modern English a typically ‘religious style’ is found only as an additional layer in religious texts, which, by and large, follow the general standardising tendencies of the language at the time.

This chapter discusses how analyses of historical developments in the English language can be informed by Construction Grammar, which models linguistic knowledge as a network of interconnected form–meaning pairs. Adopting this view of language, a growing body of constructional research addresses questions of how new form–meaning pairs come into being, how their interconnections change in the network and how the entire network develops over time. Engagement with these questions provides new perspectives on familiar phenomena, and it directs our attention to issues that have not been studied before. This chapter surveys theoretical proposals that apply notions from Construction Grammar to the study of language change, and by reviewing empirical studies of historical change from a constructional perspective across different domains in English grammar.