The article describes the attempt of the authors to compile an annotated corpus of texts written in the Albanian language before 1840’s. This corpus makes part of the Albanian National Corpus (ANC). We tell about our practical experience of digitization and morphological annotation of an early Albanian text, “E mbsuame e krështerë” (1592) by Luca Matranga. We also test and demonstrate the possibilities of the corpus-aided approach to this text, taken as such and in comparison with the contemporary texts of the Corpus written in the modern Standard Albanian, and discuss the usage of this approach for the study of the Albanian historical grammar and lexicon