The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant.

This chapter provides an overview of the history of books and printing in English, in four sections defined by time period. Each section briefly surveys the technological innovations of that period and discusses how the changing print industry influenced and reflected developments of English between 1476 and the present. After an introduction (7.1), Section 7.2 discusses the rise of print in England during the incunabula and early print period (1476–1640). Section 7.3 then follows the continued expansion of print across England and North America during the hand-press period (1641–c. 1800), and Section 7.4 considers the explosion of printed texts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The final section culminates with an overview of the rise of digital reading platforms and a discussion of how the ongoing evolution of text technologies continues to influence the development of English today.

Adopting a broad understanding of editing, this chapter views medieval and early modern text producers as precursors of present-day scholarly textual editors. The chapter surveys how editors from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century discuss their choices concerning the selection and reproduction of texts when making them available to contemporary audiences. Editors’ awareness of the historical nature of their project makes their work philological. The comments examined in the chapter are obtained from editors’ prefatory materials from three time periods: 1. the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, before the emergence of scholarly editing and the disciplinisation of English studies; 2. the mid nineteenth century – characterised by a more systematised activity in vernacular text editing and societies promoting it; 3. the twenty-first century, dominated by the rise of digital editing. The survey shows that editors of all three periods address textual selection and reproduction in their comments. Although editors in all periods sometimes arrive at similar editorial solutions, for example in favour of the faithful linguistic reproduction of the source, their decisions do not necessarily spring from similar motives. Throughout the three periods, editors convey their ideas of the target audience; readability is identified as a major editorial concern from early on.

The anglophone slang lexis has been recorded for 500 years and probably been used for much longer. Initially seen as a purely crime-based vocabulary, and despised as such, it has gradually moved into ‘civilian’ use: still outlawed, still looked down upon by many, but an essential part of the greater English language. The story is geographical as well as social: if slang was a British creation until the nineteenth century, the former colonies of the US and Australia have generated their own slangs. It is they, especially African Americans, who dominate the lexis now.

This chapter focuses on grammatical writing from the seventh century to the publication of the first grammar of English in the sixteenth. Except for the last one, these texts focus primarily on Latin grammar, though the vernacular languages spoken in England played an important role since the engagement with Latin grammar resulted in grammatical descriptions of the vernaculars themselves. The chapter opens with an introduction to the teaching of Latin grammar and continues with a discussion of the English content of Ælfric’s Grammar. Then it provides insights into grammar writing after the Norman Conquest and takes a detailed look at the grammatical treatises in Middle English and the linguistic data these treatises provide. The chapter finishes with an outlook to the sixteenth century and the publication of the authorised ‘Lily Grammar’ and of Bullokar’s Pamphlet for Grammar (1586), the first grammar of English.

The chapter is divided into two parts, focusing on historiography and methodology, respectively, and linked by a survey of the functions of punctuation over time. The historiographical part offers a discussion on the principles of written language, the fundamental representational principles and functional designs in the history of English orthography, and the system and status of Present-Day English orthography in terms of the main historical lines as seen from structural as well as sociolinguistic viewpoints. The emphasis in the methodological part is on the development of new approaches and methodologies based on the expanding digitisation of historical texts that have grown in interdisciplinary ways out of the traditional philological paradigm – research primarily using large digital datasets and corpus-driven methodologies, as well as exploring the data in innovative ways to chart sociolinguistic networks.

This tri-part chapter reports early and modern women’s roles in language contact, transmission and codification, acknowledging limitations of mediated and absent evidence. In contact, English has been both a colonising and colonised language. Women’s surviving Englishes index privilege or vulnerability, and contextualised social values: Standard English mediating ex-slave narratives symbolised tyranny and humanity simultaneously. In corpus studies, surviving correspondence and other genres hint at literate women’s roles in the transmission and development of English; records and roles are more elusive as status falls. Women’s linguistic innovations in changes ‘from below’ may reflect social subordination. Educated women increasingly lead changes ‘from above’, as education and standardisation spread. Women’s codifying texts initially overrepresented their roles as domestic educators, but their rhetorical responses to social inequities occasionally provoke statutory redefinitions of terms such as person and woman.

The lexicalised use of the term ‘bad data’ in present-day sociolinguistics refers to fragmentary material which is the only data for a certain source, for example a historical stage of a variety/language. Although far from ideal, such data can nonetheless yield significant insights if examined and assessed judiciously. In this chapter two quite different cases are considered to illustrate how one can proceed with such data. The first considers the development of Voice Onset Time in Received Pronunciation, embodied in the recorded speeches of English monarchs, while the second looks at how supraregional accents of Irish English changed between the late nineteenth and the mid twentieth century by appraising the changes in pronunciation across generations of speakers, which resulted from shifts in political and cultural status and which were subsequently mirrored by shifts in linguistic identity.

Nathalie Carnes takes a fine selection of concrete examples from different times and cultures to show that material objects, icons, images, and art can be a natural extension of Christian worship. Through the incarnation and its continuation, they can carry a set of meanings that enhance and clarify the liturgy and make it a sensory reality in complementary ways.

Clare Johnson provides a careful discussion of the “other” six sacraments that the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church celebrate. Relying on the liturgical books themselves, she investigates their biblical roots, the logic behind their coherence, and their theological significance.