Books published by Pennsylvania State University Press

Utilizes the collection of magic texts from the late Middle Ages at St. Augustine's, Canterbury, to examine the orthodoxy of magical approaches to the medieval universe and to show how it was possible to combine magical studies with a monastic vocation.

Covers the important finds at Tall al-'Umayri, an archaeological dig site in western Jordan, in 2002. Includes a summary of the cumulative results of all excavation seasons to date, from 1984 through 2002.

A collection of seventeen previously unpublished Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, dating to ca. 2000 BC and containing works of Sumerian religious poetry. Includes a general introduction, transliterations, translations, commentaries, hand-copies and photographs of all texts.

A collection of essays examining the Australian Citizens' Parliament, a project in deliberative democracy held in 2009. Explores its organization, the deliberation, the flow of beliefs and ideas, facilitator and organizer effects, and its impacts from a variety of theoretical, empirical, and practice perspectives.

Examines the lives and religious commitments of the Philadelphia elite during the period of industrial prosperity that extended from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s.

A collection of critical essays by leading scholars on British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott. Essays cover all aspects of Oakeshott's thought, from his theory of knowledge and philosophies of history, religion, art, and education to his reflections on morality, politics, and law.

A critical translation of the unabridged Italian text of Domenico Bernini's biography of his father, seventeenth-century sculptor, architect, painter, and playwright Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). Includes commentary on the author's data and interpretations, contrasting them with other contemporary primary sources and recent scholarship.

Explores the political philosophy of John Rawls in relation to public policy issues, including war, mental disability, nonhuman animals, legacy, and affirmative action. Pays special attention to the relationship of religion to these issues and to the processual characteristics of Rawls's method.

Draws on philosophical and novelistic texts from the Western European and Russian canons to explore a crucial moment in the epistemological history of narrative and present a nonreductive way of conjugating the histories of philosophy and the novel.

An inventory of the private possessions of Lorenzo il Magnifico de' Medici, head of the ruling Medici family during the apogee of the Florentine Renaissance.

Explores the Byzantine aesthetic of fugitive appearances by placing and filming art objects in spaces of changing light, and by uncovering the shifting appearances expressed in poetry, descriptions of art, and liturgical performance.

A first-hand account, by a U.S. diplomat, of the 1967 military coup in Greece, and of how U.S. policy was formulated, debated, and implemented during this period. Explores Greek-U.S. relations within the larger historical framework of the Cold War.

Explores the life and work of Lydia Bailey, a leading printer in the book trade in Philadelphia from 1808 to 1861. Includes a list of almost nine hundred of her known imprints.

Describes the role of traditional Jewish texts in the development of modern Yiddish literature, as well as the closely related development of modern Hebrew literature.

Examines the potential for distrust in an environment of ethnocultural diversity arising from increasing rates of immigration, and its implications for a democratic society. Incorporates democratic theory, multiculturalism theory, and migration theory.

Presented in this volume is a collection of the shorter writings of one of the more innovative scholars working on the relationship between the writings of the Hebrew Bible and its ancient Near East context. Topics include: ANE environment, literature of the ANE, myth versus history, Nebuchadnezzar I's Elamite crisis, Job and the Israelite religious tradition, motif of the weeping God in Jeremiah, lament tradition in ANE, the hand of Yahweh, and whether God lies.

An analysis of the Hebrew Bible's non-Semitic terminology, providing insight into foreign contact in ancient Israel.

Offers a collection of 18 articles all which touch on Mesopotamia. This title covers areas of the Sumerians in their landscapes, archaic city seals, the lady of girsu, and a model court case.

The period between the accession of Nabonasser, in 747 B.C.E., and the accession of Nabopolasser, in 625 B.C.E., was a period of significant stability for the city of Babylon, due in large part to the projection of Assyrian power in the region. During this transitional period, increased economic activity throughout Babylonia resulted in an increase in the amount of written evidence. And the legal and administrative texts that have thus far come to light are, in the words of J. A. Brinkman, “a mine of information for researchers interested in demography, social institutions, economic history, and even ancient technology.” In this volume, John Nielsen provides an index of the personal names found on texts from this period. As such, the index is a valuable supplement to the Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire project (Helsinki). Information presented in the book is modeled on the Helsinki project’s publications. The index includes comprehensive cross-references to the CAD, Stamm’s Namengebung, the Helsinki PNAE indexes, Hölscher’s Personennamen, and Knut Tallqvist’s Neubabylonisch Namenbuch. Nielsen’s prosopographical index adds a major new resource to the study of the Neo-Babylonian period.

A collection of archaeologist Jacob Kaplan's unpublished field work, focusing on the Pottery Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods of Israel within the late prehistory of the Levant.

Presents a new approach to Jorge Luis Borges' work, exploring dimensions of his literary project involving theology, blindness, literary imagination, gender, sexuality, and suicide.

Provides updated editions of seventy-one historical inscriptions of Ashurbanipal and includes all historical inscriptions on clay prisms, clay cylinders, and wall slabs, as well as on other stone objects (including paving stones) from Nineveh, Assur, and Kalhu.

Ancient cities served as the actual, worldly landscape populated by “material” sites of memory. Some of these sites were personal and others were directly and intentionally involved in the shaping of a collective social memory, such as palaces, temples, inscriptions, walls, and gates. Many cities were also sites of social memory in a very different way. Like Babylon, Nineveh, or Jerusalem, they served as ciphers that activated and communicated various mnemonic worlds as they integrated multiple images, remembered events, and provided a variety of meanings in diverse ancient communities.Memory and the City in Ancient Israel contributes to the study of social memory in ancient Israel in the late Persian and early Hellenistic periods by exploring “the city,” both urban spaces and urban centers. It opens with a study that compares basic conceptualizing tendencies of cities in Mesopotamia with their counterparts in ancient Israel. Its essays then explore memories of gates, domestic spaces, threshing floors, palaces, city gardens and parks, natural and “domesticated” water in urban settings, cisterns, and wells. Finally, the studies turn to particular cities of memory in ancient Israel: Jerusalem, Samaria, Shechem, Mizpah, Tyre, Nineveh, and Babylon. The volume, which emerged from meetings of the European Association of Biblical Studies, includes the work of Stéphanie Anthonioz, Yairah Amit, Ehud Ben Zvi, KÃ¥re Berge, Diana Edelman, Hadi Ghantous, Anne Katrine Gudme, Philippe Guillaume, Russell Hobson, Steven W. Holloway, Francis Landy, Daniel Pioske, Ulrike Sals, Carla Sulzbach, Karolien Vermeulen, and Carey Walsh.