EMERY, RICHARD WILDER°

EMERY, RICHARD WILDER° (1912–1989), U.S. historian. Emery was professor of history at Queens College, New York. A non-Jew interested in medieval French history, Emery began detailed research on the rich notarial records of Perpignan in southern France. The amount of material of Jewish interest was so great that he devoted a separate volume to this subject, The Jews of Perpignan in the Thirteenth Century: An Economic Study Based on Notarial Records (1959), which was followed by other monographs. This is the most detailed study of certain aspects of the history of a medieval Jewish community that has ever appeared, and it reveals the existence of vast untapped sources of information. In addition, his studies have thrown much light on the real extent and consequences of the forced conversions that began in 1391 and on eminent personalities, such as menahem meiri and profiat duran . He also wrote The Friars in Medieval France: A Catalogue of French Mendicant Convents 1200–1550 (1962) and Heresy and Inquisition in Narbonne (1967). (Cecil Roth)