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.