Abstract This study investigates the viability of using large language models ( llm s) to conduct pragmatic annotations of historical texts. The investigation employs a small corpus of witness depositions and compares Claude 3.5 Sonnet — an llm that excels in reasoning over text — with two human annotators over their performance in the pragmatic annotation of Early Modern English ( em od e ) texts. The study also compares the model’s annotations on modernised and original versions of the corpus to explore if em od e spelling variations affect its performance. The results revealed that although the model’s annotations were less satisfactory than human annotators’, it achieved moderate inter-coder agreement and balanced precision and recall, which is desirable in this particular task by maximising identification without sacrificing accuracy. Furthermore, the prevalent spelling variations did not significantly impair the model’s ability to recognise epistemic stance in the original em od e texts. Therefore, we propose a human– ai collaboration approach for historical pragmatic annotation.

The paper traces the development of the preposition, the adverb, and the conjunction BEFORE. It proves that BEFORE was formed as a preposition in early Old English. Its frequency subsequently decreased before resuming its development in the late 19th century. The adverb BEFORE was transposed from the preposition and institutionalized in Old English; it experienced constant growth up to late Middle English, when the category suffered decay. The conjunction BEFORE was transposed from the preposition in early Middle English and was characterized by prolonged institutionalization, which ended in early Modern English when the category started evolving.

This article analyzes overlooked evidence concerning the conscription of boys by early modern English choirs and theatre companies, arguing that legal and cultural representations depicted these abductions as benevolent while violating consent. It further speculates that points of contact between the theatrical economy and the Virginia Company may have prompted authorities to use a parallel mode of impressment to take Powhatan children to populate Henrico College. I argue that the practices of coercion and abduction on the English stage can provide a useful framework for understanding the rhetoric of benign subservience that the English authorities cultivated in an Atlantic context.

This introduction presents a new collection of essays examining the role of conversion in early modern English drama. Together, the contributions demonstrate how the theatre served as a space for dramatizing the political, theological, and psychological complexities of identity transformation. With case studies ranging from city comedy to colonial propaganda, the volume emphasizes conversion’s entanglement with race, gender, and performance. Drawing on recent scholarship, the authors highlight drama’s unique capacity to stage conversional doubt, sincerity, and dissimulation — establishing theatre as both a site of ideological reinforcement and a medium for interrogating the limits of belief and belonging.

Abstract This article introduces a novel approach to understanding cultural meaning through the geometric analysis of word vectors in early modern English. Using a seventeenth-century corpus Early English Books Online (EEBO-TCP), the study constructs semantic models that chart the moral and gendered associations of over 32,000 words. Building on methods from distributional concept analysis, the authors define heuristic axes—good-evil and feminine-masculine—and project words onto these axes to explore normative structures embedded in language use. Statistical metrics such as situation, spread, and slope reveal how concepts align with broader patterns of moralized gender. Notably, most terms cluster in the ‘feminine/evil’ quadrant, yet semantic neighborhoods often slope toward abstract, masculine, and positive domains. A new metric, the moral contrast score, enables unsupervised discovery of latent binaries, identifying the cultural dimensions that structure early modern discourse—from affective expression and trust to social refinement and territorial legitimacy. The result is a richly layered moral landscape, where contrasts are not static but overlapping and mobile. Far from mapping fixed binaries, the model reveals a dynamic, high-dimensional field in which language organizes—and reconfigures—cultural values. This method offers a scalable, interpretive framework for investigating the moral geometry of meaning in historical texts.

Þe boke of Ypocras is a zodiacal lunary which outlines the effects that the moon causes in each of the twelve zodiacal signs upon parts of the body leading to different diseases. During the Late Middle Ages this tract circulated extensively and was translated from Latin into different European vernaculars. Middle English manuscript witnesses have been recently studied (Diego Rodríguez, Þe boke). However, post-1500 witnesses remain unidentified and unedited. This paper aims to bring to light the sixteenth-century witness of Þe boke of Ypocras contained in London, Wellcome Library. MS 7117 (ff.92r–94). Its edition enables the identification of this witness and to place it in the line of transmission. Also, it provides new insights to reflect on how this treatise influenced the ongoing interpenetration of medical astrological thought in the sixteenth century

ABSTRACT This article investigates the evolution of female speech in early modern English drama, focusing on the quantitative analysis of the number of words spoken by female characters in plays written between 1550 and 1700. Drawing on data from the open-access Rolecall database, this study examines the correlation between the size of female roles in the plays of the Renaissance and Restoration periods and important socio-cultural factors of the theatremaking culture of the time, with particular attention to the impact of women actors, dramatists, and managers on theatrical production. Moreover, the article also explores the differences in female speech distribution in plays according to dramatic genre, acting companies, and performance venues, thus shedding light on the significance of other, less frequently considered factors that played a part in determining the overall presence of female characters in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England’s commercial theatre.

The secularisation of future expectations in practice: An empirical study of divine appeals in Early Modern English letters

ABSTRACT This essay examines the pedagogical challenges and opportunities of teaching Edmund Spenser's “Book of Chastity” from The Faerie Queene (1590/1596) to South Korean undergraduate women in the post‐#MeToo era. Set against the backdrop of student protests against campus sexual misconduct, the study explores how an early modern English poem portraying non‐consensual relationships is received in a contemporary, all‐female academic setting. Through a case study of an upper‐level course on women and literature, the research investigates students' responses to Spenser's allegory, focusing on its treatment of female agency and consent within the prevailing rape culture. The essay highlights the complexities of bridging early modern literature with current discussions on gender and consent, examining students' critical engagement with a male‐authored canon addressing chastity and consent. By exploring these pedagogical experiences, the study contributes to the ongoing dialog about teaching historically significant and yet potentially problematic texts in a modern, culturally specific context, while remaining sensitive to evolving perspectives on gender, consent, and literary interpretation in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

Abstract In this essay, I argue that it is possible to understand Othello’s demand for “ocular proof” as a response to early modern English devotional practices that were rooted in experiential Protestant theology. In particular, I read Othello’s obsession with gathering empirical and visual proof of Desdemona’s infidelity alongside William Perkins’s attempts to outline an “ocular catechism” that could help English Protestants determine whether they were saved or damned. In the early modern English Calvinism of Perkins’s popular devotional handbooks, bodily experience could demonstrate and corroborate otherwise unseen or unknowable spiritual truth by serving as evidentiary proof of salvation. In my reading of Othello, my aim is to explore how this overlooked aspect of early modern English popular divinity would have shaped how Shakespeare’s original audiences understood the connection between Othello’s theological convictions and his epistemological quest for certitude. Contrary to arguments posed by other readers of the tragedy who have portrayed Othello as an avatar for non-Christian and non-Protestant religion, I maintain that Othello never deviates from the epistemological worldview afforded by experiential Reformed theology. I suggest that Othello’s search for “ocular proof” models experiential devotional practices that gained popularity in post-Reformation England, where many would have regarded outward and bodily gestures as key evidence in the epistemological quest for spiritual truth.

Abstract A wealth of linguistic data has been annotated by corpus linguists, and this extant annotated data can be used to automatically replicate and apply the linguist’s annotation scheme by means of machine learning models. This paper accompanies the release of documented code notebooks, which allow corpus linguists to use manually categorized examples or ‘training data’ as input for a predictive language model. By means of a case study of Early Modern English - ing forms, we describe how the predictive language model MacBERTh can be used to accurately replicate the manual data classification scheme employed in previous corpus linguistic studies. Additionally, we discuss how manual error analysis and post-correction may help improve the model’s output. By openly releasing the data and code used in this paper, we hope to stimulate the use of machine learning models such as MacBERTh in corpus linguistics.

: <i>New Directions in Early Modern English Drama: Edges, Spaces, Intersections</i>

This article explores early modern English and Scottish visits to libraries in Continental Europe through the prism of tourism history to argue that the period was crucial for the early development of bibliotourism. Travellers experienced libraries as holistic spaces, paying attention to the appearance of the buildings, decorations inside the libraries they visited, and the materiality of the objects they encountered. Their experience of libraries was curated by librarians and library-keepers, who created tourist trails consisting of a limited number of star exhibits in their collections. Visitors often experienced libraries in conjunction with other similar institutions, especially cabinets of curiosities. Libraries were a place for in-depth scholarship for some, but they were sightseeing tourist destinations for most visitors.

Review of Landert (2024): Methods in Historical Corpus Pragmatics: Epistemic Stance in Early Modern English

Kaethler, Mark, and Grant Williams, eds. Historicizing the Embodied Imagination in Early Modern English Literature

Abstract We argue that traditional breaking of the historical long vowels in the predecessor of Southern Standard British English (e.g. Wells 1982, 213ff) is in fact ongliding to (or prevocalisation of) r in jr/wr which has been ongoing starting with (at least) Middle English, continued into Early Modern English and Southern Standard British English. It can be captured as prevocalisation of pharyngeal r before j/w-final diphthongs in terms of gestural phonology, producing sequences like fijər fear, fejər fare. This schwa-like onglide to r allows us to look at Middle English from a different perspective, from the point of view of a ‘tug of war’ between the long monophthongs and diphthongs (inherited from Old English, to which we can add Old French and Norse words) with identical stressed peaks (e.g. ij tile vs iː life, nice; uː shower vs uw power, etc.). This resulted in a merger favouring a diphthongal basis in the southern varieties of Middle English (as opposed to its northern counterparts, in which a monophthongal basis was established), resulting in fire/shower (&lt; Old English fȳr/scūr) having ij and uw, respectively, setting the stage for prevocalisation in jr/wr (merging them with original ijə(r)/uwə(r)). We explore some of the consequences of such a supposition.

This study examined archaic pronouns in the selected passages of Wuthering Heights, with a specific focus on the pronouns 'ye,' 'thy,' 'thee,' and 'thou.' The objective is to explore the different types of archaic pronouns used by characters and what their equivalents are in modern English. Through a qualitative analysis, the research explores how they functioned in Early Modern English reflected in the novel and how they correspond to pronouns in modern English. The findings reveal that 'ye' occurs 13 times, 'thy' 6 times, 'thee' 5 times, and 'thou' 4 times. In terms of modern equivalents, 'ye' corresponds to 'you' (plural), 'thy' to 'your' (possessive), 'thee' is replaced by 'you' (object), and 'thou' corresponds to 'you' (subject, informal). The study concludes that the shift from these archaic pronouns to the standardization of contemporary 'you' and 'your' reflects both grammatical simplification and social changes, signifying the loss of distinctions between singular and plural forms, as well as formal and informal addresses in English. The results highlight the evolution of English towards a more uniform structure, driven by cultural and linguistic developments.

Joseph Smith's Spiritual Language: The Presence of Early Modern English in the Book of Mormon

This review considers Ari Friedlander's Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature: Desire, Status, Biopolitics.

The article focuses on the issue of authorial modality as a cognitive-discursive category as addressed in semantics of lexical units, in particular, connotatively loaded ones, which are realised in the texts of time- remote Shakespeare’s plays and their chronologically distant Ukrainian retranslations of the 19th–21st cen- turies. The objective of the research is the study and semantic interpretation of authorial modality as a cog- nitive-discursive category, which is carried out by identifying the semantic contents and determining the scope of information of the entropic connotatively loaded lexical units that embody authorial modality in time-remote Shakespeare’s plays and chronologically distant Ukrainian retranslations of the 19th–21st cen- turies. The research material is taken from two tragedies by William Shakespeare, namely, “Romeo and Ju- liet” (1594), and “King Lear” (1608), which serve as samples of Early Modern English at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, and their chronologically distant Ukrainian retranslations of the 19th–21st centuries. The units of analysis are connotatively loaded lexical units in Shakespeare’s plays and their counterparts in Ukrainian retranslations. The research methodology incorporates empirical methods, such as analysis and synthesis to estab- lish the theoretical framework, and also specialized linguistic methods, such as descriptive, semantic, and stylistic analysis, is used to identify the scope of information conveyed by the connotatively loaded lex- ical units in both the source texts and their Ukrainian retranslations. Finally, to compare lexical units in the source texts and retranslations, methods of comparative translation and transformational analysis are used, which allows identifying changes in the scope of information due to the authorial modality of differ- ent authors, which distinguishes various Ukrainian retranslations at different chronological periods. The article argues that the study of modality as one of an individual’s cognitive faculties in linguistic theories of semantic interpretation is based on the complex mental-speech essence of the category of mo- dality, which is manifested in the ratio of objective and subjective reality reflected in the human mind, to- gether with various means of its expression. The authorial modality is considered a cognitive-discursive cat- egory since it reflects the author’s subjective perception of reality embodied in a literary work under the in- fluence of his / her linguistic, cultural, and national values, personal language usage, and individual psycho- logical and aesthetic preferences. The subjectivity of authorial modality in Shakespeare’s plays and their Ukrainian retranslations affects the way Shakespeare conveys his message (information) in the semantics of connotatively loaded lexical units, which are highly entropic, and the way Ukrainian authors interpret them. The creative personalities of translators play a key role in overcoming the information entropy of connotatively loaded lexical units when working with time-remote Shakespeare’s plays. The authorial mo- dality of Shakespeare’s plays and their chronologically distant Ukrainian retranslations of the 19th–21st cen- turies is manifested in different scope of information presented by Shakespeare and Ukrainian translators. Each translator realises his / her own authorial modality as a reflection of the model of reality and its sub- jective evaluation under the influence of highly entropic connotatively loaded lexical units.