While much early Yiddish literature belonged to pious genres, quasi-secular genres—epic, drama, and lyric—also developed. Jerold Frakes contends that the historical context of the emergence of Yiddish literature is an essential factor in any understanding of its cultural relevance in a time and place where Jewish life was defined by expulsions, massacres, and discriminatory legislation that profoundly altered European Judaism and shook the very foundations of traditional Jewish society.

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This study of Yiddish texts dating from 1100 to 1750 is the definitive work in the field. Frakes is at home in the classics, medieval studies, German studies, comparative religion, and Hebrew and Yiddish, and he brings to this historical study of many of the same texts the impeccable scholarship characteristic of his previous works.