This book addresses three activities: reporters evoking speech events; interpreters (re)constituting those speech events; and historical pragmaticians eavesdropping in time on the reporters and interpreters. Offering a methodology for historical-pragmatic reconstruction to explain the synchronic patterns of variation in premodern writings, the book examines the distribution of reporting strategies in a corpus of medieval Russian texts. Reporting is seen as an activity of rational agents coordinating interpretation in accordance with cultural and institutional notions of relevance.