Product Description: This book explores the complexity of preaching as a phenomenon in the medieval Jewish-Christian encounter. This was not only an "encounter" as physical meeting or confrontation (such as the forced attendance of Jews at Christian sermons that took place across Europe), but also an "imaginary" or theological encounter in which Jews remained a figure from a distant constructed time and place who served only to underline and verify Christian teachings...read more

Contemporary misogyny and antisemitism have their roots in the demonization of women and Jews in medieval Christendom. In church art and mass preaching, the construct of the devil as an outcast from heaven and the source of all evil was linked both to the conception of women as sensual and malicious figures betraying man's soul on its arduous journey to salvation and to the notion of Jews as treacherous dissidents in the Christian landscape. These stereotypes, widely disseminated for over three hundred years, persist today. 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

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Product Description: From the Introduction: "This is a study of the sermons, the preachers, and the organization of the preaching of the crusades against Islam to recover the Holy Land for Christendom and maintain it under christian domination. It addresses the ideas of the crusade and the language in which they were couched...read more

Product Description: This volume grew out of sessions on medieval preaching and sermons at the International Congress on Medieval Studies. Consisting of thirteen essays, each a chapter in the history of preaching, it presents a diverse selection of historical periods, methodologies, and audiences...read more

Saint Bernard chose the Song of Songs as the vehicle for expressing his deepest and highly personal longing for God, his striving for 'full knowledge, clear Vision, a strong bond of union, a relationship which cannot be broken apart, and perfect likeness.'