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The study of ego-documents figures as a prominent theme in cutting-edge research in the Humanities. Focusing on private letters, diaries and autobiography, this volume covers a wide range of different languages and historical periods, from the sixteenth century to World War I. The volume stands out by its consistent application of the most recent developments in historical-sociolinguistic methodology in research on first-person writings.
Some of the articles concentrate on social differences in relation to linguistic variation in the historical context. Others hone in on self-representation, writer-addressee interaction and identity work. The key issue of the relationship between speech and writing is addressed when investigating the hybridity of ego-documents, which may contain both "oral" features and elements typical of the written language.
The volume is of interest to a wide readership, ranging from scholars of historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, sociology and social history to (advanced) graduate and postgraduate students in courses on language variation and change.

Touching the Past

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