Joanna Kopaczyk is a researcher in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh and an associate professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. She is a historical linguist with an interest in corpus methods, formulaic language, the history of Scots and historical multilingualism. She has given talks at conferences in Europe, the USA and Australia, and taught on various aspects of the history of English and Scots at universities in Poland, Germany, Finland, and the UK. Hans Sauer is emeritus professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in München and currently also professor at Vistula University, Warsaw. He received a festschrift on his 65th birthday, and the commemorative medal of the faculty of arts at the Masarykova Univerzita v Brnĕ, Czech Republic. He was president of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS) in 2004–5, and a member of the advisory board of the Richard Rawlinson Center (RRC) at the Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo for twenty years.