The main aim of this volume, an edited version of the author’s Habilitationsschrift, is to investigate the potential offered by corpus-based quantitative methods in historical-comparative linguistics. Specifically, the author investigates the development of verbal syntax (e.g. finite vs. non-finite constructions, the role of main vs. subordinate clauses, etc.) in six Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Catalan, Portuguese and Romanian) from the 14th century onwards. This he does on the basis of translations into these languages of the first fourteen chapters of Titus Livius’s Ab Urbe condita. Stein carefully chronicles the lives and works of Livius’s translators, discusses the usefulness of translations in historical linguistic research, and the idea of ‘norm’ in linguistics.