Penn State University Press: 456 books
Exiled in Modernity
Delacroix, Civilization, and Barbarism
Language: English
Release Date: February 6, 2018
Notions of civilization and barbarism were intrinsic to Eugène Delacroix’s artistic practice: he wrote regularly about these concepts in his journal, and the tensions between the two were the subject of numerous paintings, including his most ambitious mural project, the ceiling of the Library of...
Middle English Marvels
Magic, Spectacle, and Morality in the Fourteenth Century
Language: English
Release Date: January 24, 2018
This multidisciplinary volume illustrates how representations of magic in fourteenth-century romances link the supernatural, spectacle, and morality in distinctive ways.
Supernatural marvels represented in vivid visual detail are foundational to the characteristic Middle English genres of romance...
Charlemagne and Louis the Pious
Lives by Einhard, Notker, Ermoldus, Thegan, and the Astronomer
Language: English
Release Date: November 9, 2009
Carolingian historical texts have long stood at the base of our modern knowledge about the eighth and ninth centuries. The ninth century gave birth to a new revival of secular biography, which has come to be recognized as one of the brightest bands in the spectrum of Carolingian historical writing....
Measuring Shadows
Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility
Language: English
Release Date: February 19, 2016
In Measuring Shadows, Raz Chen-Morris demonstrates that a close study of Kepler’s Optics is essential to understanding his astronomical work and his scientific epistemology. He explores Kepler’s radical break from scientific and epistemological traditions and shows how the seventeenth-century...
Zen and the Unspeakable God
Comparative Interpretations of Mystical Experience
Language: English
Release Date: October 21, 2015
Zen and the Unspeakable God reevaluates how we study mystical experience. Forsaking the prescriptive epistemological box that has constrained the conversation for decades, ensuring that methodology has overshadowed subject matter, Jason Blum proposes a new interpretive approach—one that begins with...
A Time of Sifting
Mystical Marriage and the Crisis of Moravian Piety in the Eighteenth Century
Language: English
Release Date: June 9, 2015
At the end of the 1740s, the Moravians, a young and rapidly expanding radical-Pietist movement, experienced a crisis soon labeled the Sifting Time. As Moravian leaders attempted to lead the church away from the abuses of the crisis, they also tried to erase the memory of this controversial and embarrassing...
Picturing Dogs, Seeing Ourselves
Vintage American Photographs
Language: English
Release Date: August 29, 2014
Dogs are as ubiquitous in American culture as white picket fences and apple pie, embracing all the meanings of wholesome domestic life—family, fidelity, comfort, protection, nurturance, and love—as well as symbolizing some of the less palatable connotations of home and family, including domination,...
Becoming Centaur
Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship
Language: English
Release Date: April 20, 2017
In this study of the relationship between men and their horses in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, Monica Mattfeld explores the experience of horsemanship and how it defined one’s gendered and political positions within society.
Men of the period used horses to transform themselves,...
Venezuela Before Chávez
Anatomy of an Economic Collapse
Language: English
Release Date: January 27, 2014
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Venezuela had one of the poorest economies in Latin America, but by 1970 it had become the richest country in the region and one of the twenty richest countries in the world, ahead of countries such as Greece, Israel, and Spain. Between 1978 and 2001, however,...
The Making of a Market
Credit, Henequen, and Notaries in Yucatán, 1850–1900
Language: English
Release Date: February 22, 2012
During the nineteenth century, Yucatán moved effectively from its colonial past into modernity, transforming from a cattle-ranching and subsistence-farming economy to a booming export-oriented agricultural economy. Yucatán and its economy grew in response to increasing demand from the United States...
Staging Habla de Negros
Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain
Language: English
Release Date: May 31, 2019
In this volume, Nicholas R. Jones analyzes white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater from the 1500s through the 1700s, when the performance of Africanized Castilian, commonly referred to as habla de negros (black speech), was in vogue.
Focusing on Spanish Golden Age theater...
by Claude-François de Lezay-Marnésia
Language: English
Release Date: January 11, 2017
Language: English
Release Date: January 11, 2017
First published in French in 1792, Letters Written from the Banks of the Ohio tells the fascinating story of French aristocrat Claude-François de Lezay-Marnésia and the utopia he attempted to create in what is now Ohio.
Looking to build a perfect society based on what France might have become...
by Robert Asen
Language: English
Release Date: August 18, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: August 18, 2015
The local school board is one of America’s enduring venues of lay democracy at work. In Democracy, Deliberation, and Education, Robert Asen takes the pulse of this democratic exemplar through an in-depth study of three local school boards in Wisconsin. In so doing, Asen identifies the broader democratic...
Plowshares
Protest, Performance, and Religious Identity in the Nuclear Age
Language: English
Release Date: August 18, 2016
In September 1980, eight Catholic activists made their way into a Pennsylvania General Electric plant housing parts for nuclear missiles. Evading security guards, these activists pounded on missile nose cones with hammers and then covered the cones in their own blood. This act of nonviolent resistance...