Notarial documents and private letters are the only types of historical texts that systematically include date and place of production. Moreover, such texts offer a wide stylistic range, from documents issued by kings to letters written by the common folk, including texts produced by groups that have historically had less access to writing, particularly women. For the above-mentioned reasons, the increasing availability of historical documents in electronic format, along with new tools for data extraction and analysis, opens up new avenues in the study of the evolution of the Spanish language.

The contributions in this volume take advantage of these new data sources to make advances in our understanding of the historical evolution of Spanish. The investigations can be classified along three lines: historical dialectology, with studies that trace the geographic origins of linguistic innovations and their patterns of diffusion on the physical space; historical sociolinguistics, with a focus on groups traditionally neglected in language history studies, such as women; and textual heritage investigations that explore new data sources and how they allow us to broaden the perspectives of study of the history of the language.