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.
The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer
Invisible Cathedrals places Wilhelm Worringer in the foreground of discussions of Expressionism and German Modernism for the first time. These essays not only reveal the complexities of his individual works, such as Abstraction and Empathy (1908) and Form Problems of the Gothic (1911), they also examine his ......
Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XIV's France
The Affair of the Poisons was the greatest court scandal of the seventeenth century. From 1679 to 1682 the French crown investigated more than 400 people—including Louis XIV’s official mistress and members of the highest-ranking circles at court—for sensational crimes. In Strange Revelations, Lynn Mollenauer brings ......
The feast of Corpus Christi, one of the most solemn feasts of the Latin Church, can be traced to the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and its resolution of disputes over the nature of the Eucharist. The feast was first celebrated in Liège in 1246, thanks largely to the efforts of a religious woman, Juliana of Mont Cornillon, who not only ......
To be free is to escape all limitations and obstacles—or so we think at first. But if we probe further, we discover that freedom embraces its own necessities, a set of conditions without which it could not exist. Freedom's Embrace explores these necessities of freedom.
J. Melvin Woody surveys competing conceptions of ......
This book continues the official history of the CIA begun in Arthur Darling's The Central Intelligence Agency.
Ludwell Lee Montague's book is one of the first documents, along with Darling's history, to be declassified and made available under the CIA's Historical Review Program, launched in 1985. Montague was a leading ......
In Is Philosophy Androcentric?, Iddo Landau contends that none of the arguments for viewing philosophy as pervasively androcentric ultimately stand up to rational scrutiny, while the ones that show it to be nonpervasively androcentric do not undermine it in the way that many critics have supposed. “Philosophy emerges, in almost ......
In the Middle Ages, textual amulets - short texts written on parchment or paper and worn on the body - were thought to protect the bearer against enemies, to heal afflictions caused by demonic invasions, and to bring the wearer good fortune.
Ralph Waldo Emerson defined a weed as a "plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered." To the wild-plant enthusiast who has discovered the virtues of many plants, there are relatively few weeds. After using this book, you will never again consider lamb's-quarters a weed. Instead, you will nurture it with respect and even encourage ......
The Voyage and Adventures of William Moraley, an Indentured Servant
First published by Penn State Press in 1992, The Infortunate has become a staple for teachers and students of American history. William Moraley’s firsthand account of bound servitude provides a rare glimpse of life among the lower classes in England and the American colonies during the eighteenth century. In the decade since its ......
