This collection of 22 original articles starts with an introduction that is both a state-of-the-art account of historical pragmatics and a programmatic statement of its future potential and its different subfields. Part I contains pragmaphilological papers that deal with historical texts and their interpretations and papers in diachronic pragmatics. The papers of part II study pragmatic functions of a linguistic form at different times, while the papers of part III take a particular pragmatic function as their starting point, and study their linguistic realisation at different times.