The writing of responsa goes back to the Gaonic period in approximately the eighth century and continues to this very day. Surveying responsa literature, we find more than 5,600 titles of Hebrew books containing responsa. The responsa documented in the present volume describe and document the classic corpus of responsa as well as rare responsa scattered in books devoted to other themes. Encyclopaediac in scope, this book will be of interest to scholars of Jewish history and students of the history of the Hebrew book. Among the features of the Kuntress are: biographical details of authors, a list of each known edition, pagination of each edition, a division of each book according to the sections of the Shulkhan Aruch, the original annotations of Professor Boaz Cohen, updates to scholarly literature and responsa in rare books and polemical pamphlets.

The Present Volume covers Hebrew titles beginning with the letters resh-taw and contains bibliographical descriptions of more than 1,000 books of responsa.