The exemplum, or cautionary story incorporated into preachers' manuals and popular homilies, was an important mode of religious teaching for clerical and lay folk alike. Sermon narratives drawn from Hindu mythology, Arab storytelling, and secular folktales entertained all classes of medieval society while dispensing theological and cultural instruction.
In Devils, Women, and Jews, the vital genre of the medieval sermon story is, for the first time, made accessible to specialists and nonspecialists alike. Rendered in modern English, the tales provide an invaluable primary resource for medievalists, anthropologists, psychologists, folklorists, and students of women's studies and Judaica. Critical introductions and explanatory headnotes contextualize the tales, and comprehensive endnotes and a bibliography allow readers to follow up analogue and subject studies in their own areas of interest.
"This book makes available, for the first time, a large body of exempla demonizing the medieval 'other' and forming, thus, medieval vernacular society's mentality regarding the psychology of evil." -- Katharina M. Wilson, coeditor of Wykked Wyves and the Woes of Marriage: Misogamous Literature From Juvenal to Chaucer
