Founded in 1956, Penn State University Press publishes rigorously reviewed, high-quality works of scholarship and books of regional and contemporary interest, with a focus on the humanities and social sciences. The publishing arm of the Pennsylvania State University and a division of the Penn State University Libraries, the Press promotes the advance of scholarship by disseminating knowledge—new information, interpretations, methods of analysis—widely in books, journals, and digital publications.
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A collection of writings by papal advisor and historian Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540), including letters, treatises, reports, and orations spanning his long career in service to the Medici.
Founded in 1956, the French psychiatric clinic La Chesnaie is an open and welcoming facility that houses about one hundred people of all ages. It provides traditional forms of care for people with serious mental illness, but it does so in a uniquely supportive environment where patients and caregivers participate equally in the day-to-day ......
Explores how the Fifth Crusade was remembered and commemorated during its triumphs and immediately after its disastrous conclusion. Provides a study of medieval war memory, showing that in the early decades of the thirteenth century, remembering war was an important means of creating and expressing collective and individual belonging.
Illustrates how the discovery of electromagnetism in 1820 not only led to technological inventions, such as the dynamo and the telegraph, but also legitimized modes of reasoning that manifested a sharper ability to perceive how metonymic relations could reveal the order of things.
A collection of essays focusing on the relationship between concepts of the holy and the unholy in western European medieval culture. Demonstrates how religion, magic, and science were all modes of engagement with a natural world that was understood to be divinely created and infused with mysterious ......
Although we are currently bombarded with numerous health scares—AIDS, West Nile virus, avian flu, and the recent swine flu, just to name a few that now fill our media reports and instill dread in the population—we can scarcely imagine the outlook that dominated the mindset of those who endured the bubonic plague in England during ......
Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature
Pursuing things yet unattempted in literary criticism, Reginald A. Wilburn offers the first scholarly work to theorize African American authors’ rebellious appropriations of Milton and his canon. This comparative and hybrid study engages African Americans’ transatlantic negotiations with perhaps the preeminent freedom writer in the ......
Drawing Degree Zero examines a pivotal moment in the history of drawing, when the medium was disengaged from its connoisseurial associations and positioned at the forefront of contemporary art. From Mel Bochner's seminal exhibition Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art of 1966 to the ......
Mary Shelley lived and wrote during an age of religious instability, one that witnessed the spread of atheism, millenarianism, Methodism, Unitarianism, and Evangelicalism, among other belief systems. In this book, Jennifer L. Airey foregrounds Shelley as an important religious thinker of the Romantic period, analyzing her creative engagement ......
