Introduction; 1. Communicating manuscripts: authors, scribes, readers, listeners and communicating characters Andreas H. Jucker and Päivi Pahta; Part I. Authors, Scribes and their Audiences: 2. Commonplace-book communication: role shifts and text functions in Robert Reynes's notes contained in MS Tanner 407 Thomas Kohnen; 3. Textuality in late medieval England: two case studies Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti; 4. The significance of now-dispersed Bute 13: a mixed-language scientific manuscript Patricia Deery Kurtz and Linda Ehrsam Voigts; 5. Communicating attitudes and values through language choices: diatopic and diastratic variation in Mary Magdalene in MS Digby 133 Maurizio Gotti and Stefania Maci; 6. Constructing the audiences of the Old Bailey Trials 1674-1834 Elizabeth Closs Traugott; Part II. Communicating through Handwritten Correspondence: 7. A defiant gentleman or 'the strengest thiefe of Wales': reinterpreting the politics in a medieval correspondence Merja Stenroos and Martti Mäkinen; 8. Sociopragmatic aspects of person reference in Nathaniel Bacon's letters Minna Palander-Collin and Minna Nevala; 9. Poetic collaboration and competition in the late seventeenth century: George Stepney's letters to Jacob Tonson and Matthew Prior Susan Fitzmaurice; 10. Handwritten communication in nineteenth-century business correspondence Marina Dossena; Part III. From Manuscript to Print: 11. The relationship between MS Hunter 409 and the 1532 edition of Chaucer's works edited by William Thynne Graham D. Caie; 12. The development of play-texts: from manuscript to print Jonathan Culpeper and Jane Demmen; 13. Communicating Galen's Methodus medendi in Middle and Early Modern English Päivi Pahta, Turo Hiltunen, Ville Marttila, Maura Ratia, Carla Suhr and Jukka Tyrkkö; 14. Prepositional modifiers in early English medical prose: a study ON their historical development IN noun phrases Douglas Biber, Bethany Gray, Alpo Honkapohja and Päivi Pahta; 15. The pragmatics of punctuation in Older Scots Jeremy Smith and Christian Kay; Part IV. Manuscripts and their Communicating Characters: 16. Greetings and farewells in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales Andreas H. Jucker; 17. Attitudes of the accused in the Salem witchcraft trials Leena Kahlas-Tarkka and Matti Rissanen.