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.
The Ancient City and Its Stories in Middle English Poetry
This volume explores the conflicting representations of ancient Romeone of the most important European cities in the medieval imaginationin late Middle English poetry.
Once the capital of a great pagan empire whose ruined monuments still inspired awe in the Middle Ages, Rome, the seat of the pope, became a site of ......
A reassessment of the regency of Queen Mariana of Austria (1634-1696) during the minority of her son, King Carlos II of Spain, offering a new perspective on the Spanish monarchy in the later seventeenth century.
In this book, Bob Becking provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the origins, lives, and eventual fate of the Yehudites, or Judeans, at Elephantine, framed within the greater history of the rise and fall of the Persian Empire.
The Yehudites were among those mercenaries recruited by the Persians to defend the ......
Gender, Crime, and Punishment in Antebellum Pennsylvania
This book traces the lived experiences of women lawbreakers in the state of Pennsylvania from 1820 to 1860 through the records of more than six thousand criminal court cases. By following these women from the perpetration of their crimes through the state's efforts to punish and reform them, Erica Rhodes Hayden places them at the center of ......
The Emperors' Slaves in the Makings of Christianity
In this volume, Michael Flexsenhar III advances the argument that imperial slaves and freedpersons in the Roman Empire were essential to early Christians' self-conception as a distinct people in the Mediterranean and played a multifaceted role in the making of early Christianity.
From the pundits to the polls, nearly everyone seems to agree that US politics have rarely been more fractious, and calls for a return to “civil discourse” abound. Yet it is also true that the requirements of polite discourse effectively silence those who are not in power, gaming the system against the disenfranchised. What, then, ......
In Textual Spaces, Richard E. Keatley examines how French travelers experienced, consumed, and represented Italian space during the early modern period. This study digs beneath the façade of leisurely travel literature to unearth a complex web of rhetorical, sociological, and political values that conditioned and ......
Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain
In this volume, Nicholas R. Jones analyzes white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater from the 1500s through the 1700s, when the performance of Africanized Castilian, commonly referred to as habla de negros (black speech), was in vogue.
Volume II: Excavations Outside the Medieval Town Walls
Reports findings from the 1996, 2002, 2006, 2012, 2013, and 2017 excavation seasons at the Apollonia-Arsuf archaeological site, located on a fossilized sandstone dune ridge on the Mediterranean coast of Israel.
