Books published by Harvard University Press

The Pearlsong is an ancient poem that recounts the story of a Parthian prince sent on a mission to Egypt to retrieve a pearl from the clutches of a giant serpent. Along the way, he falls asleep, forgetting his identity. This edition includes the original Syriac text, a Greek translation, a Greek homily version, and English translation.

In Renaissance Italy, the Galenic "wonder drug" theriac became a vehicle for political, pharmaceutical, and commercial power. The State Drug shows how regimes and medical authorities secured support by promoting and regulating theriac. In turn, it sheds new light on the relationship between medicine and authority in early modern Europe.

Zongyuan Zoe Liu provides the first in-depth examination of sovereign funds in China. Under President Xi, the state has become an aggressive financier, using sovereign funds at home and abroad to secure allies and influence, boost strategic industries like semiconductors and fintech, and pick winners among domestic businesses and multinationals.

The China Questions 2 assembles top experts to explore key issues in US-China relations today, including conflict over Taiwan, economic and military competition, public health concerns, and areas of cooperation. Rejecting a new Cold War mindset, the authors call for dealing with the world's most important bilateral relationship on its own terms.

Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, Volume 42 includes lectures by Helen Fulton and Gregory Darwin, as well as articles on the Irish language, medieval libraries, the role of music in the Welsh Mabinogi, and the emerging area of animal studies in relation to Celtic literature.

Paul P. Mariani charts China's fraught Catholic revival after the Cultural Revolution, as Catholics loyal to Rome clashed with a state-sanctioned church. Focusing on Shanghai, where the state-appointed Bishop Louis Jin Luxian found himself at odds with underground church leaders, Mariani details a community perilously divided.

The Buddha's Path to Awakening recounts the story of the Buddha's great quest for enlightenment as narrated in the Pali text known as J¿takanid¿na. It is one of the most significant biographical works in the Buddhist tradition. This volume presents a new, authoritative translation, accompanied by the original Pali story.

The legendary conversation between the Greek King Milinda and the Buddhist monk Nagasena-known in Pali as the Milindapañha-was first documented over two thousand years ago. The Questions of Milinda features a modern English translation of this renowned ancient Buddhist philosophical text, alongside the original Pali text.

Brandon Bloch examines the remarkable transformation of German Protestantism after WWII. As avid nationalists and militarists, Protestant leaders had largely backed the Nazi regime. Yet after 1945, they reinvented themselves as champions of constitutional democracy and human rights-while also seeking to whitewash the Church's past.

The Democratic Marketplace argues that democracy has been hollowed out by capitalism. Seeking a path to self-governance, Lisa Herzog theorizes a market compatible with democracy, showing how inequality disables citizenship, why employees need a say in corporate decisions, and how to balance growth with sustainability and ideals of the common good.

The thirteenth-century Art of Making Verses, which departs from established critical texts on poetry and seeks to teach the art of verse in an entirely new way, was composed by the English poet and teacher Gervase of Melkley. This edition presents an improved Latin edition based on the manuscripts and a new English translation.

The Dantesque political allegory The Labyrinth of Fortune, composed in 1444 by Juan de Mena, reflects on Juan II of Castile's contentious kingship and frames the Reconquest of Moorish territories as a sacred task. This is the first English translation of a Spanish masterpiece that influenced Miguel Cervantes and Luis de Góngora.

How did Hong Kong, long an affluent and depoliticized hub of global capitalism, become the center of popular anticolonial protest? Ching Kwan Lee provides a reflective history and vivid ethnography of an improbable decolonization movement, exploring what drives Hong Kongers' pursuit of a future built on democracy, justice, and self-determination.

Health and the Art of Living offers reflections on health and illness in early medieval Chinese literature (ca. 200-ca. 600) through a range of literary sources-essays, prefaces, correspondence, religious scriptures, and poetry; including works by Liu Xie and Xie Lingyun.

Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Volume 114 includes articles by Daniel Sutton, Ruobing Xian, Adalberto Magnavacca, Maxwell Hardy, Julia Hejduk and Gary Vos on works such as Aristotle's Rhetoric and Herodotus's Histories, among others.

In the 1930s, amid rising fascism, FDR and the New Dealers invented the doctrine of national security, which obligated the state to guard against not just territorial invasion but also remote threats to the "American way of life." Total Defense explores how the new idea of national security transformed the United States and its place in the world.

The Writer's Lot explores the working lives of eighteenth-century French authors-celebrities and unknowns-at a time when their example, if not often their ideas, changed the course of history. Taking the measure of "literary France" as a whole, Robert Darnton offers rare insight into the social ferment of the Age of Revolution.

College students are more diverse and less financially privileged than ever, but achievement gaps persist. Offering straightforward, research-driven advice for educators who want all students to attain their goals, David Gooblar describes pedagogical methods for breaking down psychological and economic barriers to marginalized students' success.

The Mending of Broken Bones reveals that far from a set of mundane exercises, algebra is the delicate craft of untangling numerical puzzles to uncover the hidden patterns and surprising behaviors of the numbers themselves. As Paul Lockhart shows, you don't have to be a mathematician to experience the joy and creativity of mathematical discovery.

Why did the Allied leaders-Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin-largely keep quiet about the Holocaust? Richard Breitman examines the competing political and military considerations that drove their responses to Nazi mass murder, showing how and why all three leaders often prioritized wartime constraints over moral considerations.

Richard Primus challenges the prevailing view that Congress is constrained to exercise only those powers enumerated in the Constitution. Analyzing constitutional text and history, as well as the structure of US federalism, Primus shows that the primary function of enumeration is to rule the listed powers in, not to rule other powers out.

Proteins link all life on Earth and enable its most astonishing capacities-from a firefly's glow to the navigational abilities of migrating birds to human emotional experience. The Color of North explores the curious biology and immense impact of proteins, as well as the potential of engineered proteins to treat disease and restore our planet.