Since the publication of the first edition of this seminar book in 1994, the theory and applications of extremes and rare events have enjoyed an enormous and still increasing interest. The intention of the book is to give a mathematically oriented development of the theory of rare events underlying various applications. This characteristic of the book was strengthened in the second edition by incorporating various new results on about 130 additional pages. Part II, which has been added in the second edition, discusses recent developments in multivariate extreme value theory. Particularly notable is a new spectral decomposition of multivariate distributions in univariate ones which makes multivariate questions more accessible in theory and practice. One of the most innovative and fruitful topics during the last decades was the introduction of generalized Pareto distributions in the univariate extreme value theory. Such a statistical modelling of extremes is now systematically developed in the multivariate framework.