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.
Scholarly publishing has faced monumental challenges over the past few decades. The Press takes its place among those institutions moving the enterprise forward. Its innovative projects continue to identify and embrace the technological advances and business models that ensure scholarly publishing will remain feasible, and widely accessible, well into the future.
A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love
Julian of Norwich (ca. 1343–ca. 1416), a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and John Wyclif, is the earliest woman writer of English we know about. Although she described herself as “a simple creature unlettered,” Julian is now widely recognized as one of the great speculative theologians of the Middle Ages, ......
The Scientific Artworks of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot and the Salpetriere School
In this book, Natasha Ruiz-Gomez delves into an extraordinary collection of pathological drawings, photographs, sculptures, and casts created by neurologists at Paris's Hopital de la Salpetriere in the nineteenth century. Led by Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) and known collectively as the Salpetriere School, these savants-artistes produced ......
The Lives of Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy
During the fourteenth century in Western Europe, there was a growing interest in imitating the practices of a group of hermits known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Laypeople and religious alike learned about their rituals not only through readings from the Vitae patrum (Lives of the Desert Fathers) and sermons but also through the images that ......
Traces the history of three massive palaces built outside Naples in the eighteenth century-at Capodimonte, Portici, and Caserta-and examines how these buildings were designed to help reshape the economic and cultural fortunes of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
A revisionist account of the Spanish witch-hunt that took place in northern Navarre from 1608 to 1614. Combines new readings of the Inquisitional evidence with archival finds from non-Inquisitional sources, including local secular and religious courts, and from notarial and census records.
A Renaissance Treatise on the Healing Properties of Gemstones
In early modern Europe precious and semiprecious stones were valued not only for their beauty and rarity but also for their medical and magical properties. Lorenzo de' Medici, Philip II of Spain, and Popes Leo X and Clement VII were all treated with expensive potions incorporating ground gems such as rubies, diamonds, and emeralds. Medical and ......
Explores the visual idioms that made, sustained, revised, and resisted Cartesian philosophy. Locates Descartes's physics and its reception in a panoramic visual culture, where knowledge of the invisible depended on what could be seen.
