This chapter presents current research demonstrating that orthographic variation does not only occur naturally in historical texts, but also shows systematic patterns and functional uses. Premodern orthographic systems are flexible and offer room for innovation. This is a decisive characteristic and an important precondition for orthographic variation and change. This chapter includes an overview of types and functions of historical orthographic variation and different processes of orthographic change on the basis of examples from the history of German and from runic writing. It aims, on the one hand, to give a general introduction to the topic, and, on the other hand, to discuss theoretical and methodological issues in the study of variation and change in historical orthography that provide a background against which a research question and design for the study of variation and change in historical orthographies can be defined.

This chapter sketches the history of philology and charts its use as a method for analyzing and understanding orthographic variation. Its chronological arrangement spans the discipline’s development, from the roots of philology in the Classical period to present-day incarnations of the approach. Such incarnations have seen philology move from its use as a tool which sought to make sense of orthographic variation in order to facilitate textual editing, to one which, combined with newer theoretical linguistic approaches, gave rise to disciplines such as historical sociolinguistics or pragmaphilology, where extralinguistic contexts are brought to bear on linguistic data. The authors present two case studies exemplifying contemporary philological approaches to historical orthography. The first one uses a manuscript-centered methodology to illustrate the contrasting copying-practices of two scribes working on the Tanner version of the Old English translation of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica. The second one focuses on the scripting of /w/ in Old English and Old High German and demonstrates how an etymological sound reference system can be employed for graphemic analysis.