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 critical study of the history of public art museums in Austria-Hungary, examining their place in the wider history of European museums and collecting, their role as public institutions, and their involvement in the complex cultural politics of the Habsburg state.
During the nineteenth century, Albrecht Dürer’s art, piety, and personal character were held up as models to inspire contemporary artists and—it was hoped—to return Germany to international artistic eminence. In this book, Jeffrey Chipps Smith explores Dürer’s complex posthumous reception during the great ......
George Washington and the Invention of the Republic
“Among the vicissitudes incident to life, no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the fourteenth day of the present month.”
Examines a series of powerful artifacts traditionally associated with King Solomon, largely via extra-canonical textual sources--Solomon’s ring, bottles to contain evil forces, the so-called Solomon’s knot, a shamir, and a flying carpet--and traces their varying cultural resonances.
Collecting Paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck, and Their Circles
The United States possesses extraordinary holdings of seventeenth-century Flemish paintings. In this pioneering and richly illustrated volume, twelve scholars and museum curators reveal the origins of these collections by examining the American approach to and interest in the collecting of Flemish art over the course of the nineteenth and ......
Known as “La Chièvre de Reims,” Robert de Reims was among the earliest trouvères—poet-composers who were contemporaries of the troubadours, but who wrote their works in the northern dialects of France. This critical edition provides new translations into English and Modern French of all the songs and motets ......
An unparalleled encyclopedic collaboration between award-winning Mexican-American scholar Ilan Stavans and illustrator Eko, A Pre-Columbian Bestiary features lively and informative descriptions of forty-six religious, mythical, and ......
Field Language presents the work of an extraordinary couple who together left the rural lifeways of their Mennonite upbringing to go “into the world” to create forms of modern art that reflected on the places and culture they came from. Published on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition devoted to the working ......
