This volume presents Middle English studies as a modern discipline which unites linguistics literature philology the history of ideas textual studies including recent developments in the study of text types and genres as well as the sociohistorical perspective. This large variety of both traditional and new approaches is mirrored in the four main parts of the book starting with texts and text types and moving on to vocabulary syntax and morphology and finally phonology and orthography. Aspects of language as well as corpus linguistic studies are also addressed in a number of contributions. Authors are leading experts in their fields and come from the United States South Africa and all parts of Europe.