This volume brings together a selection of 28 out of the 76 papers read at ICHEL-7 in Valencia. The book opens with a general section, in which Richard Hogg examines the relationship between linguistics and philology, Enrique Bernárdez analyzes syntactic change from the point of view of catastrophe theory, Roger Sell suggests a pragmatic analysis of historical data, and Norman Blake and Jacek Fisiak re-open the debate on periodization in the history of English. The rest of the papers is grouped in four sections: Phonology and Writing, Morphology and Syntax, Lexicology and Semantics, and Varieties of English and Studies on Individual Texts.