Proverbs and exempla are two literary genres which developed in parallel throughout the Middle Ages. There was often cross-fertilisation between them, for both were engaged in the same discourses; jurisprudence, philosophy, theology, historiography and literature all drew on proverbs and exempla in their arguments. The interdisciplinary papers in the present volume examine the co-existence of proverbs and exempla in both Latin literature and the vernacular literatures of the Romance and Germanic languages.