The volume contains 23 papers read at the international conference "Historical Corpora 2012", which was hosted by the LOEWE Research Cluster "Digital Humanities" of the State of Hesse at the University of Frankfurt on December 6-8, 2012. All in all, the conference comprised 27 individual papers plus five keynote speeches, three of which have been integrated in the present volume, too. The contributions, which have been duly updated, take a broad variety of perspectives on "historical corpora", including their structuring, their management, and various facets of the increase of knowledge they can provide. In addition to this, the papers cover a large amount of different languages, German - in nearly all its historical facettes -being the most widely addressed, however, the range of vernaculars treated extends far beyond that, across the Romance languages into the Caucasus and from the recent past down into antiquity. Differences also concern the linguistic interests prevailing in the papers, which may focus on syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, lexicological or other phenomena.

Shota Rustaveli’s „Knight in the Tiger’s Skin“ is regarded as the national epic of the Georgians. As a work of the early 13th century, it connects in an impressive way ideas of Christian Orthodoxy with elements of ancient Greek philosophy and the Islamic culture of Persia. The German adaptation of 1955 by Hugo Huppert, reprinted in the present edition, attempts to render the style and content of the epic as closely as possible. The volume is decorated with 54 illuminations from the 17th-18th century manuscript S-5006 of the National Centre for Manuscripts, Tbilisi, which exhibit strong influences of Persian models in their filigreed design.