The book is an attempt to examine the significance, function, and placing of comparisons and identifications with an exemplary figure, primarily in the main branches of the Western European vernacular lyric up to the end of the fourteenth century, i.e. the troubadour lyric of Southern France (including also Catalan and Italian poets who write in the langue d'oc), the trouvère lyric of Northern France, the German lyric, and the Sicilian and Italian lyric. These branches are all interrelated, in that the trouvère lyric, the German lyric, and the Sicilian and Italian lyric are all to a greater or lesser extent influenced either directly or indirectly by the troubadour lyric. Thus among the first attested exemplary comparisons in the medieval German lyric are those which are directly based on Romance models, suggesting that this was an unfamiliar stylistic feature in the indigenous lyric and one borrowed, along with much else, from Romance poets.

In order to set exemplary comparisons and identifications in the medieval vernacular lyric in context, it is necessary firstly and more generally to consider their antecedents in the classical tradition of simile, as it was initially established in the works of Homer and at first mediated indirectly to the West through Virgil and other Latin authors. The tradition continues not only in narrative poetry, but also in all types of classical and post-classical Latin verse. Due allowance must of course be made for differences between narrative and other poetic genres as the context in which the examples are set, but none the less, reference to the general tradition is instructive as background to a closer study of exemplary comparisons and identifications in the medieval vernacular lyric.