Early texts are characterised by diversity: pages containing largely the same text will vary in linguistic features, specific content, and, crucially for the present study, visual appearance. Within their separate arenas, both book historians and historical pragmaticians have embraced this diversity and variation in their research, but neither field has availed itself of the tool kit of the other. The present study therefore draws upon book history and materialist philology on the one hand and historical pragmatics and historical discourse linguistics on the other. The authors call their approach ‘pragmatics on the page’. In this article they propose a four-stage methodology and illustrate it by means of a case study based on the Polychronicon, a text composed in late medieval England and surviving in numerous manuscript copies and early printed editions.