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 Fifteenth-Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee, with a prologue by Friar Erhard von Pappenheim
This fifteenth-century haggadah, with a prologue by a Dominican friar, offers a unique view of contemporary Christian perceptions of Judaism. This edition includes a facsimile of the codex; a critical edition and translation of the prologue; a translation of the haggadah; and essays describing the historical and theological ......
Examines the social roles, cultural meanings, and active agency of precious stones in jeweled crowns, illustrated lapidaries, and illustrated travel accounts in the European Middle Ages.
This book, designed for both scholarly research and as a classroom text, covers the entire span of Middle Eastern history from 1000 BC to the modern day, as well as modern Middle Eastern issues, such as freedom of the press, women in society, sectarian violence, democracy, and Islamic aesthetics. The history portion has individual chapters on: ......
As the availability and use of media platforms continue to expand, the cultural visibility of religion is on the rise, leading to questions about religious authority: Where does it come from? How is it established? What might be changing it? The contributors to The Media and Religious Authority examine the ways in which new centers ......
Explores how modern means of communication are changing religion, and how contemporary mediations of religion challenge and refine the aspirations and prospects of religious authority.
The Northern Frontier of Assyria as a Case Study in Imperial Dynamics
This study of the Assyrian empire utilizes the vast corpus of archaeological and textual data from the Mesopotamian Iron Age (ca. 1000–600 B.C.) to address current debates about ancient imperialism. The importance of this work reaches beyond historical reconstruction to offer significant new insights into the nature of frontiers, ......
This monograph is the product of Stern's two decades of excavation at Tel Dor on the Carmel Coast, a city that Egyptian sources indicate was ruled in the eleventh century BCE by a Sikil king. Near the end of the period during which he directed excavations there, Stern began to notice the unique material culture of the Northern Sea Peoples and ......
Taking advantage of the unprecedented access to books and information that has become available in the last few years, this bibliography identifies and traces the history of hundreds of books and articles on Ecclesiastes published in many different languages before 1875. It includes not just scholarly literature but exegetical sermons, ......