Corpus of Early English medical writing 1375–1750

Scientific writing is a general label with a great deal of variation at any period. Empirical evidence of variation within genres of the early periods has been produced by studies of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, as they have shown that umbrella categories like ‘religious treatises’ or ‘scientific writing’ contain very heterogeneous texts (Meurman-Solin 1993, Taavitsainen 1993, 1994a). Multipurpose multigenre corpora like the Helsinki Corpus contain a limited number of texts representing each genre, and thus it is evident that a one-genre corpus with a larger number of texts will yield a more detailed account of the evolution of that particular genre. The new lines of development in stylistic studies applied in corpus linguistics (eg Biber 1988) and discourse analysis (Schiffrin 1994) applied to professional languages provide a good starting point for developing a new approach to corpus-based genre studies. For such applications, we are compiling a corpus of early English medical writing.