In the last three decades, metadiscourse has caught the attention of numerous scholars from various research disciplines. This book adds to the discussion by looking at the phenomenon from a historical angle. Text analyses with a corpus of sermons and religious treatises from the 13th to the 18th century provide new insights into the way authors guide their audience through their texts and persuade them of their points of view. The focus on the Middle and Early Modern English periods, which witnessed the disintegration of the Catholic Church in England, the Reformation, the decline of Scholasticism and the advent of Renaissance Humanism, makes evident the influence of socio-cultural factors, text-type conventions, and a changing author-addressee relationship on the development of metadiscourse.