ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the 'St. Georgener Predigten and the 'Schwarzwälder Predigten'; together with the sermons attributed to Berthold of Regensburg, these constitute the most extensive German sermon collections of the thirteenth century. It presents the resulting observations systematized and formulated as hypotheses. Then these hypotheses tested in the case of sermon material from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. More insight into anti-Judaistic attitudes in medieval society is provided by genres such as the religious drama, in which the anti-Judaism of the New Testament melds with prejudices about the Jewish religion and negative characterizations of the Jewish people, providing a fertile breeding ground for a very widespread and all-encompassing antisemitism. In the case of the German sermons this may have to do with the fact that in the fifteenth century, in the vast majority of cases, the lines of transmission of German-language religious literature still ran via the women's convents and religious houses or via the Carthusian order.
