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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The proliferation of work on the theological hermeneutics of Scripture in recent years has challenged and reimagined the divisions between systematic theology and biblical studies on the one hand and academy and church on the other. Also notable, however, has been the absence of a full-length treatment of theological interpretation from a ......
In this book, James A. Greenberg examines animal sacrifice in Priestly Torah texts found in Leviticus 1–16, Exodus, and Numbers. Through his analysis, Greenberg identifies a new valence of kipper as a process that produces a positive result between two objects and argues that the Israelite sanctuary exists to facilitate a ......
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, ......
Studies in Jewish History and Culture in Honor of Lee I. Levine
In 1961, when Lee Israel Levine graduated from both Columbia College in New York, majoring in philosophy, and Jewish Theological Seminary, majoring in Talmud, this accomplishment was only a precursor to the brilliant career that would follow. While researching his Columbia University dissertation in Jerusalem, Levine established close ties with ......
Mary Shelley lived and wrote during an age of religious instability, one that witnessed the spread of atheism, millenarianism, Methodism, Unitarianism, and Evangelicalism, among other belief systems. In this book, Jennifer L. Airey foregrounds Shelley as an important religious thinker of the Romantic period, analyzing her creative engagement ......
In this book, Megan Cassidy-Welch challenges the notion that using memories of war to articulate and communicate collective identity is exclusively a modern phenomenon. War and Memory at the Time of the Fifth Crusade explores how and why remembering war came to be culturally meaningful during the early thirteenth ......
Writing Art and History in Nineteenth-Century France
Jules Michelet, one of France’s most influential historians and a founder of modern historical practice, was a passionate viewer and relentless interpreter of the visual arts. In this book, Michèle Hannoosh examines the crucial role that art writing played in Michelet’s work and shows how it decisively influenced his theory of ......
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.
School Letters, Model Contracts, and Related Texts
In ancient Mesopotamia, men training to be scribes copied model letters in order to practice writing and familiarize themselves with epistolary forms and expressions. Similarly, model contracts were used to teach them how to draw up agreements for the transactions typical of everyday economic life. This volume makes available a trove of ......
