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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The History of the British Museum's Girsu Collection
Sumeromania uncovers the dramatic and complex story behind one of the British Museum's most important holdings: its vast collection of objects from the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu (modern Tello, Iraq). From statues of rulers to thousands of cuneiform tablets, these artifacts entered the museum during a period of fierce competition among ......
Slaves of the Church and the Making of Kongo Catholicism
By the time the Capuchins arrived in the seventeenth century, Kongo had been Catholic for nearly two hundred years. The European mission could not be conversion, then, but reinforcement; the Capuchins sought to establish the sacraments and a line to Rome in a lay-led church already suffused with an enduring, creative, and complex theological ......
John Chrysostom and Domestic Rituals in Fourth-Century Antioch
What did it mean for ordinary believers to live a Christian life in late antiquity? In Christians at Home, Blake Leyerle explores this question through the writings, teachings, and reception of John Chrysostom-a priest of Antioch who went on to become the bishop of Constantinople in AD 397. Through elaborate spatial and ritual recommendations, ......
During World War II, religious pacifist David Miller and a group of conscientious objectors made an extraordinary choice: they signed up for government-sponsored medical experiments that intentionally infected them with hepatitis. Their goal was simple but dangerous-help scientists understand a disease that was sickening American soldiers fighting ......
Selected Poems by Juan de Castellanos, Bartolome de Flores, and Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo
The Epic of Florida brings to light a neglected tradition of colonial poetry from the sixteenth century. Written in response to dramatic encounters on the peninsula-Ponce de Leon's landfall in 1513, the founding of St. Augustine in 1565, and ongoing conflicts among European empires and Native peoples-these works capture how early modern writers ......
Selected Poems by Juan de Castellanos, Bartolome de Flores, and Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo
The Epic of Florida brings to light a neglected tradition of colonial poetry from the sixteenth century. Written in response to dramatic encounters on the peninsula-Ponce de Leon's landfall in 1513, the founding of St. Augustine in 1565, and ongoing conflicts among European empires and Native peoples-these works capture how early modern writers ......
Purity Culture, Bodies, and Beliefs confronts the enduring effects of religious trauma by centering the body as both a site of harm and a source of healing. This collection offers a necessary space for truth telling, grief, and renewal. Bringing together critical autoethnographies and theoretical reflection, this volume examines how purity ......
Purity Culture, Bodies, and Beliefs confronts the enduring effects of religious trauma by centering the body as both a site of harm and a source of healing. This collection offers a necessary space for truth telling, grief, and renewal. Bringing together critical autoethnographies and theoretical reflection, this volume examines how purity ......
Few artists were as determined to shape their own legacy as James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Fiercely protective of his reputation, he denounced would-be biographers, published The Gentle Art of Making Enemies as his own autobiography, and destroyed works he thought unworthy of his genius, declaring more than once that "to destroy is to survive." ......
