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 essays examining the Holiness, Radical Holiness, and Pentecostal movements, focusing on the circulation of ideas among these movements in the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Southeast and East Asia.
First published in 1653, The Compleat Angler is one of the most influential environmental texts ever written. Addressing a politically and religiously polarized nation devastated by warfare, disease, ecological degradation, and climate change, Izaak Walton's famous fishing treatise stages a radical thought experiment: how might humanity's enhanced ......
Hesed (steadfast love, loyalty, devotion) denotes an important concept in the Hebrew Bible that is relevant to interpersonal relationships in every generation. In this book, Karen Nelson investigates New Testament approaches to that concept and the exegetical value of recognizing such engagement. This investigation employs an original hybrid of ......
Examines the function of violence in the making of the anatomical image during the early modern era, exploring its effects on the production of knowledge and on concepts of the body.
The 1948 Notebook, with Lectures and Critical Writings
Leo Strauss famously asserted that the fundamental, defining debate within Western civilization is that between Jerusalem and Athens, piety and philosophy, the Bible and Plato. And yet, surprisingly, Strauss never published any of his thoughts on Plato's dialogue on piety, the Euthyphro. This volume presents, for the first time, Strauss's 1948 ......
A History of the Senses in Anthropology, Psychology, and Law
David Howes's sweeping history of the senses in the disciplines of anthropology and psychology and in the field of law lays the foundations for a sensational jurisprudence, or a way to do justice to and by the senses of other people. In part 1, Howes demonstrates how sensory ethnography has yielded alternative insights into how the senses ......
In the nineteenth-century United States, jokes, comic anecdotes, and bons mots about the Pacific Islands and Pacific Islanders tried to make the faraway and unfamiliar either understandable or completely incomprehensible (i.e., "other") to American readers. A Laughable Empire examines this substantial archival corpus, attempting to make sense of ......
Explores the history and meanings of ilanot, diagrammatic representations of the Divine as a Porphyrian tree in Jewish mysticism and kabbalistic manuscripts.
Traces the evolution of a Hebrew microcosm that models the interaction of human and divine bodies at the heart of both kabbalah and some forms of Western sex magic. Focuses on Jewish esoteric and medical sources from the fifth to the twelfth century from Byzantium, Persia, Iberia, and southern France.
