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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Studies Raphael's images of supernatural phenomena, including apparitions and prophetic visions, within their contemporary artistic and religious contexts. Asks how a fundamentally naturalistic style of painting like that of the Italian Renaissance can accommodate representations of the supernatural without ......
The plot of the late-medieval Spanish work Celestina (1499) centers on the ill-fated love of Calisto and Melibea and the fascinating character of their intermediary, Celestina. In this ground-breaking rereading of the play, James F. Burke offers a new interpretation of the characters' actions by analyzing medieval theories of ......
With global terrorism a seemingly daily threat, the twenty-first century is permeated with violence and in search of some way to better understand the world and its different religions and politics. In recent decades, the literary world has shifted to a similar focus, producing new works and reexamining old ones to aid in forming a vision ......
Modern Architecture, Catholicism, and the State in Central Europe, 1918-1939
Some of the most striking examples of modernist architecture are churches, yet they have seldom been subject to extended critical analysis. In this book, Matthew Rampley provides just such an analysis, focusing on the Catholic Church in interwar Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. A powerful institution in the Habsburg Empire, the Catholic ......
Why does a society seek out images of violence? What can the consumption of violent imagery teach us about the history of violence and the ways it has been represented and understood? This book addresses these questions within the context of the so-called “galleries of violence,” the series of torment imagery that flourished in the ......
Secrets in all their variety permeated early modern Europe, from the whispers of ambassadors at court to the emphatically publicized books of home remedies that flew from presses and booksellers’ shops. This interdisciplinary volume draws on approaches from art history and cultural studies to investigate the manifestations of secrecy in ......
Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the Regime du corps
Early modern central Africa comes to life in an extraordinary atlas of vivid watercolors and drawings that Italian Capuchin Franciscans, veterans of Kongo and Angola missions, composed between 1650 and 1750 for the training of future missionaries. These "practical guides" present the intricacies of the natural, social, and religious environment of ......
Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the Regime du corps
In 1256, the countess of Provence, Beatrice of Savoy, enlisted her personal physician to create a health handbook to share with her daughters. Written in French and known as the Regime du corps, this health guide would become popular and influential, with nearly seventy surviving copies made over the next two hundred years and translations in at ......
