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 Keystone State, so nicknamed because it was geographically situated in the middle of the thirteen original colonies and played a crucial role in the founding of the United States, has remained at the heart of American history. Created partly as a safe haven for people from all walks of life, Pennsylvania is today the home of diverse ......
Originally published by Routledge in 1988, this pioneering collection of essays now features a new preface and updated bibliography by the editor, reflecting the most significant developments in Plato scholarship during the past decade.
A discussion by a broadly respected authority of the complicated relationship between theology and ordinary life in the early church. The first section of the book scrutinizes theology with a view to understanding its bearing upon Christian understandings of life (the theological “stories” of Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, and ......
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity offers readers an accessible and lively introduction to the French Revolution that is also grounded in the latest and most sophisticated historical scholarship. It does so through two paths—a book and a companion CD-ROM. The book gives a brief but comprehensive narrative of the Revolution. The CD-ROM ......
Hua-yen is regarded as the highest form of Buddhism by most modern Japanese and Chinese scholars. This book is a description and analysis of the Chinese form of Buddhism called Hua-yen (or Hwa-yea), Flower Ornament, based largely on one of the more systematic treatises of its third patriarch. Hua-yen Buddhism strongly resembles Whitehead's ......
A new edition of this best-selling collection of essays by leading experts on historical methodology.
Since its first publication in 1992, New Perspectives on Historical Writing has become a key reference work used by students and researchers interested in the most important developments in the methodology and practice of ......
The bonds among republican citizens are created, in part, through the stories told and retold as the foundational myths of the republic. In this book, Melissa Matthes takes advantage of the way in which republican theorists in different eras—Livy, Machiavelli, and Rousseau—retell the story of the rape of Lucretia to support their ......
The European esoteric tradition was introduced into Russia in the eighteenth century by Freemasons and continued in Russian romantic literature of the early nineteenth century.
This study, which conjoins historiographical methods developed by modern scholars of esoterica and formalist methods of textual analysis, reveals the role ......
The dialogue has disappeared as a mode of writing philosophy, and philosophers who study Plato today often ignore the form in which Plato’s work appears in favor of reconstructing and analyzing arguments thought to be conveyed by the content of the dialogues. A distinguished classicist here offers an approach to understanding Plato that ......