(1) This man is a positive exemplum : goodhearted, worthy, beloved, and a vital part of his community.(2) The odor of public corruption that surrounded the Gasthuis land affair lent it particular force as a moral exemplum .(3) In keeping with his preface to the story, Dioneo's summing up seems deliberately to discourage any reading of the story as an exemplum , much less as a model for relationships between men and women.(4) Macbeth lives as an exemplum of the perverted hero, because of Shakespeare's ability to give life to every stage of his disastrous career.(5) A sermon exemplum from the mid-thirteenth century provides a revealing glimpse of the active role sculptures were expected to play as vehicles of identification and empathetic response.(6) For instance, the longest exemplum in this section is that of St. Christine, the author's patron saint.(7) Consequently, the exempla in this section illustrate the kind of balanced prudence encouraged by Raison and Christine: the definitive ideal is the prudent woman depicted in Proverbs 31.(8) Finally, although delivery once again receives professional attention in the form of elocution, it continues to be seen as auxiliary to rhetoric and is propped up with a multitude of literary exempla .(9) Whereas the Stewart children had few pictorial precedents on the matter of negative exempla , a bounty of pictures represented choices being made.(10) The visitor was squarely confronted with exempla of Christian faith and practice as manifested in devotional works of both East and West.(11) The poetic inscriptions on the bases of the sculptures by Donatello, which distinguish the figures as exempla by invoking spectators' attention to their feats, may be inspired by that precedent.(12) Early practitioners of preaching distinguished between verba - the words that directly defined doctrinal points - and exempla , which illustrated them.(13) Kent examines popular works read by Florentines of all social levels, including vernacular scrapbooks and miscellanies, poetry, devotional manuals and moral exempla , civic traditions, histories, and ethnographies.(14) Commonplace books could be repositories for meticulously copied out poems, proverbs, and moral exempla ; they could also permit a large degree of freedom in both the choice of material transcribed and in the way in which it was recorded.(15) For centuries past, preachers had used exempla - fables, proverbs, anecdotes - to make the principles that infused their sermons both easier understood and more attractive to their parishioners.(16) The mock-heroic story is full of rhetoric and exempla , and it is one of the most admired of the Tales, regarded as the most typically ‘Chaucerian’ in tone and content.
