Given therefore the central role of Romance and, in turn, historical linguistics assumed today within the study of linguistics and the many new and exciting perspectives that they continue to afford us in shaping and informing our theoretical understanding of the nature of language, it seemed timely to the editors to bring together in a single issue some of the foremost scholars in the field of Romance Linguistics. In the articles that follow they reflect in fresh and original ways on some major topics in historical linguistics in the light of contemporary thinking across a wide variety of formal approaches and in relation to a large body of empirical research conducted over a vast range of individual Romance languages and dialects, as well as across sub-branches of Romance from a comparative perspective.