The Corpus of Sermons in Early Modern England: A New Corpus for Idiolectal Analysis of the English Language Hiroshi Yadomi 1. Introduction This paper discusses the Corpus of Sermons in Early Modern England 1 (CoSEME), which has been compiled to study linguistic variation between individual speakers in the sole genre of sermons. The corpus was specifically prepared to analyze language on three different levels: language on the level of individual speakers, of small groups of speakers, and of the whole community of speakers. The main aim in compiling the corpus was to analyze morpho-syntactic linguistic variation of speakers in these micro levels for a better understanding of the process of language change and its motivation, which previous studies, not paying attention to the language use in local levels, could not identify. The following sections will explore the basic structure and background of the CoSEME, followed by the motivation to compile it and the scope which the corpus can offer. Idiolect – language variation unique to individual speakers – and its role in language change have received scanty attention in historical linguistics. (Bergs 2005: 5; Evans 2013: 3). However, idiolectal analysis will usefully complement previous studies to relate the more detailed history of English. The CoSEME has overcome the various methodological challenges which idiolectal analysis entails: insufficient data and different sociolinguistic and pragmatic variables potentially affecting the language choice of speakers. The CoSEME contains c. 50,000 words of sermon texts written by a single preacher, whose sociolinguistic variables (gender, social class, and age) are fixed as consistently as possible. Scholars have recently attempted to explain language variation on the level of small groups by social networks of speakers. I will attempt to identify a pattern in language variation on inter-personal levels. In the case of sermon, confessional states 1 This corpus is still in development; hence, the Corpus of Sermons in Early Modern England, version 1.0. The CoSEME may enlarge or revise its contents to extend its scope for different research purposes.