Nuria Yáñez-Bouza is Senior Lecturer at the University of Vigo, Spain and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK. Her research interests lie in historical sociolinguistics with a focus on the relationship between norms and usage in the 18th century. She has also been actively involved in the field of Digital Humanities with the compilation of corpora and electronic databases.

María E. Rodríguez-Gil is Lecturer in the Department of Modern Philology, Translation and Interpreting at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. Her research expertise lies in the field of the 18th-century grammatical tradition, the relationship between prescriptivism and descriptivism, and the history of the teaching of English to a native and non-native audience.

Javier Pérez-Guerra is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Vigo, Spain. His areas of specialisation are information packaging in the clause, multidimensional approaches to register variation as applied to earlier periods of English, the study of grammatical variation between modern and Present-day English from corpus-based empirical perspectives, and the impact of performance preferences and ease of processing on the design of grammars.

The chapters in this book address three main strands in ongoing scholarly work on prescriptivism: language, literary and scripted texts, and speech communities. Collectively, the chapters contextualise the role of prescriptivism in history as well as at the present time.