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.
Surrealism is widely thought of as an artistic movement that flourished in Europe between the two world wars. However, during the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, diverse radical affinity groups, underground subcultures, and student protest movements proclaimed their connections to surrealism. Radical Dreams argues that surrealism was more than an ......
Number and Numeracy in Late Medieval English Sermons
Explores discussions of numbers, arithmetic, and other mathematical operations in late medieval English sermons, revealing that popular English-speaking audiences were encouraged to engage in a wide range of numerate operations in their daily religious practices.
Subtexts are all around us. In conversation, business transactions, politics, literature, philosophy, and even love, the art of expressing more than what is explicitly said allows us to live and move in the world. But rarely do we reflect on this subterranean dimension of communication. In this book, renowned classicist and scholar of rhetoric ......
The History and Administration of Judah in the 8th-2nd Centuries BCE in Light of the Storage-Jar Stamp Impressions
Examines the administrative system and function of stamp impressions on storage jars in ancient Israel, illustrating the history of Judah during six centuries of subjugation to the empires that ruled the region.
First discovered in a Hungarian library in 1838, the Rohonc Codex keeps privileged company with some of the most famous unsolved writing systems in the world, notably the Voynich manuscript, the Phaistos Disk, and Linear A. Written entirely in cipher, this 400-year-old, 450-page-long, richly illustrated manuscript initially gained considerable ......
Illustrates how Oxford scholar Robert Burton used the resources available to a seventeenth century academic: genres and languages, as well as academic disciplines such as medicine and rhetoric. Demonstrates how early modern practices of knowledge and persuasion can offer a model for transdisciplinary scholarship today.
A collection of essays examining colonial Philadelphia and its surroundings as a zone of cultural and linguistic interchange. Documents everyday multilingualism and intercultural negotiations with special attention to themes of religion, education, race and the abolitionist movement, and material culture and architecture.
Representing Consciousness in the English Renaissance
A collection of essays exploring how biocultural and literary dynamics acted together to shape conceptions of sleep states in the early modern period. Essays envision sleep states as a means of defining the human, both literally and metaphorically.
