This chapter introduces the subject matter of the monograph, which is an exploration of the multifaceted nature of abbreviations in Middle English manuscripts, by examining their linguistic, visual, and pragmatic functions within scribal communities of practice. Its opening section challenge traditional paleographic approaches to medieval abbreviation by incorporating the frameworks of communities of practice, visual pragmatics, and multimodality theory. This introduction also contextualises abbreviations as elements in visually-based processes of meaning-making, including code-switching, pragmatics on the page and medieval multimodalities, highlighting their continued relevance to modern digital textuality. The chapter briefly introduces the material for the study, i.e. a corpus of manuscripts containing the works of Richard Rolle, John Lydgate and John Gower, which will be used as a testing ground for employing a novel descriptive-explanatory model to account for the complex meanings of abbreviation symbols applied in those manuscript copies.