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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Contesting Knowledge and Practice in West African Sufi Texts
Examines the works of two Sufi Muslim scholars, Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti (d. 1811) and his son Sidi Muhammad (d. 1826), focusing on their cosmology and metaphysics of the realm of the unseen, in relation to the history of magical discourses within the Hellenistic and Arabo-Islamic worlds.
Contesting Knowledge and Practice in West African Sufi Texts
Sorcery or Science? examines how two Sufi Muslim theologians who rose to prominence in the western Sahara Desert in the late eighteenth century, Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti (d. 1811) and his son and successor, Sidi Muhammad al-Kunti (d. 1826), decisively influenced the development of Sufi Muslim thought in West Africa. Known as the Kunta scholars, ......
Explores the history and practice of Lisu Christianity in southwest China, describing how the Lisu maintained their Christian faith through China's tumultuous twentieth century and into the present.
The story of how the Lisu of southwest China were evangelized one hundred years ago by the China Inland Mission is a familiar one in mission circles. The subsequent history of the Lisu church, however, is much less well known. Songs of the Lisu Hills brings this history up to date, recounting the unlikely story of ......
An interdisciplinary exploration of the diverse discourse on divine sonship in ancient Jewish and Christian literature. Authors focus on a range of issues including messianism, deification, eschatological figures, Jesus, interreligious polemics, and the Roman and Jewish backgrounds of early Christian writers and the authors of the Dead Sea ......
Originally published in 1898. Biographical sketches of women in Pennsylvania who played a valuable role in the American Revolution. Discusses their family history, their character, and their contributions to the revolutionary effort.
Pennsylvania's Civil War Veterans Who Became State Leaders
Six of Pennsylvania’s first eight post–Civil War governors were veterans of the American Civil War. This streak spanned four decades, from the election of John White Geary in 1866 to Samuel W. Pennypacker’s final day in office in January 1907. Even though these individuals rose to great political power, they did not forget ......
Saints and Saints' Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
Soldiers of Christ brings together for the first time in one volume eleven critical writings about the saints from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.
To understand European culture and society in the Middle Ages it is essential to understand the role of Christianity. And there is no better way to understand that ......
In this book, Jeffrey Merrick brings together a rich array of primary-source documents-many of which are published or translated here for the first time-that depict in detail the policing of same-sex populations in eighteenth-century France and the ways in which Parisians regarded what they called sodomy or pederasty and tribadism. Taken together, ......
