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 contact 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. Contents: Herbert Schendl/Nikolaus Ritt: Introduction - Derek Brewer: Understanding chivalry in earlier English literature - David Mills: Playing the Show, showing the Play: the Chester Plays in search of a genre - George R. Keiser: Robert Thornton's "Liber de Diversis Medicinis": text, vocabulary, and scribal confusion - Frances McSparran: Following the scribal trail: the BL Cotton Caligula A. ix copy of La amon's "Brut" - Christian Liebl: Two unnoticed Early ME versions of "Candet Nudatum Pectus" - Joanna Bugaj: Middle Scots burgh court records: the influence of the text type on its linguistic features - Irma Taavitsainen: Standardisation, house styles, and the scope of variation in ME scientific writing - Hans-J¿rgen Diller: Chaucer's emotion lexicon: "passioun" and "affeccioun" - Przemyslaw Lozowski: Polysemy in context: "meten" and "dremen" in Chaucer - Rafal Molencki: The confusion between "thurven" und "durren" in Middle English - Tibor Orsi: Ways and means of French lexical influence in the Cotton version of "Mandeville's Travels" - Thomas Honegger: 'wy e welcum iwys to this place' - and never mind the alliteration: an inquiry into the use of forms of address in two alliterative ME romances - Cynthia Lloyd: "Experience" or "experiment"? Some distinctions between French nominal suffixes in Middle English - Maurizio Gotti: Prediction in Middle English: a comparison between "shall" und "will" - Lilo Moessner: The verbal syntagm in ME conditional clauses