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.
Francis Daniel Pastorius was one of the first German settlers to Pennsylvania and a touchstone figure of German-American cultural heritage. This monumental anthology presents a selection of his many writings in one volume.
Pastorius sailed to North America as a Pietist but found a unique home among the Quakers in Pennsylvania. ......
Examines two anonymous manuscripts of magic produced in Elizabethan England: the Antiphoner Notebook and the Boxgrove Manual. Explores how scribes assembled these texts within wider cultural developments surrounding early modern forms of magic.
Published in five editions from 1621 to 1651, The Anatomy of Melancholy marks a unique moment in the development of disciplines, when fields of knowledge were distinct but not yet restrictive. In Robert Burton’s Rhetoric, Susan Wells analyzes the Anatomy, demonstrating how its early modern practices of knowledge ......
A valuable resource for teachers and students of ancient Mesopotamian and comparative ancient literatures, this introductory anthology makes the wealth of Akkadian literature easily accessible to scholars and nonspecialists.
This brief but comprehensive survey provides a thorough overview of the major works and ......
Irene Eber is one of the foremost authorities on Jews in China during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—a field that, in contrast to the study of the Jewish diaspora in Europe and the Americas, has been critically neglected. This volume gathers fourteen of Eber’s most salient articles and essays on the exchanges between ......
The book of Judges is full of characters of ambivalent moral integrity and acts of dubious propriety, such as Jael’s murder of Sisera and the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter. And yet the terse narrative and the reticent narrator frequently leave the ethical character of these actions in doubt. In order to avoid reading contemporary ......
In Ruled Reading and Biblical Criticism, Matthew T. Bell contends that the gulf in interpretive priorities between ancient and modern readers has been exaggerated and that careful study of early Christian reading practices suggests that it is both possible and productive to recontextualize early Christian "ruled ......
The history of biblical Israel, as it is told in the Hebrew Bible, differs substantially from the history of ancient Israel as it can be reconstructed using ancient Near Eastern texts and archaeological evidence. In A Brief History of Ancient Israel, Bernd U. Schipper uses this evidence to present a critical revision of the history of ......
A collection of letters by Mary Penry (1735–1804), who immigrated to America from Wales and lived in Moravian communities for more than forty years. Offers a sustained view of the spiritual and social life of a single woman in early America.
