This edited volume brings together explorations of how the communities of practice framework, which seems only to have been used in modern settings, can be applied historically. Its twelve papers are prefaced by an introduction in which the editors survey the tradition of scholarship on communicative communities, and establish the work's raison d’être: to approach communities of practice, specifically, from a pragmaphilological perspective. The concerns of pragmaphilology are uppermost in the papers, and in the organization of the volume. The contributions are divided equally into three groups, according to the nature of the hypothesized community of practice, and the physical and social context of text production and reception.

The chapters of Part 1 focus on communities of correspondents acting as primary agents in the construction of the text. As in the volume as a whole, the majority of contributions in this section set out to use their data to establish empirically the existence of a community of practice. Matylda Włodarczyck, in the final paper of the section, for instance, examines letters of petition written by British settlers of the Cape Colony from between 1820 and 1825. Her findings suggest that two communities of practice, distinguishable by their experience and proficiency at petitioning the colonial authorities, can be discerned from the data.

The papers comprising Part 2 are concerned with the transmission of texts, and the practices of scribes and printers, meaning that its focus is primarily orthographic. Jukka Tyrkkö, for example, examines the emergence of orthographic uniformity in early modern medical texts. He finds a large degree of conformity with regard to the specific changes he studies, and attributes this to the existence of a community of practice among the printers of the texts. Interestingly, several of the contributors in this section present findings that suggest diachronic functionality of communities of practice.

Part 3 returns to the origin of the concept of communities of practice, focusing on professional groupings not concerned with the commercial production of texts, and their textual output. The section opens, for example, with Olga Timofeeva's contribution, which claims to show that the consistent lexical choices of the bilingual literate clergy between the 670s and 1050s signal membership of a community of practice. Again, then, evidence is put forth for the diachronic existence of communities of practice.

This pioneering volume illustrates the wide variety of contexts in which the community of practice framework can be applied historically; even going some way towards establishing its diachronic, as well as synchronic, functionality. The vast majority of contributors demonstrate the feasibility and utility of grounding the existence of a community of practice in empirical evidence. Those few papers that fail to do this highlight that questions remain regarding the stringency with which the criteria for defining a community of practice ought to be applied. Yet the limited ingress of these issues from the original framework does little to detract from the stellar contribution this volume makes in demonstrating the feasibility and fruitfulness of applying the concept in a historical context.