Books published by Pennsylvania State University Press

A collection of writings from Dalmatian-Austrian philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and radical cultural critic Ivan Illich. Focuses on Illich's shorter writings from his early publications through the rise of his remarkable intellectual career, making available works that had fallen into undue obscurity.

A rhetorical analysis of conventional and unconventional models of homeless advocacy that positions each in relation to perennial anxieties about citizens' abilities to fulfill democratic obligations.

Advocates a conversation around the genetic risk for breast and ovarian cancers that focuses less on choice and more on care. Offers a new set of conceptual starting points for understanding what is at stake with a BRCA diagnosis and what the focus on choice obstructs from view.

A study of select nineteenth-century African American authors and reformers who mobilized the discourses of cosmopolitanism and restraint to expand the meaning of freedom.

Explores the question of how women craft meaningful "belonging" to national, regional, and global communities when belonging as a citizen becomes untenable. Evaluates the rhetorical practices that enable alternative belongings, such as denizenship, cosmopolitan nationalism, and transnational connectivity.

Examines how French Renaissance travelers consumed and represented Italian space through writing and the imagination. Includes writings by Rabelais, Montaigne, and Du Bellay as well as lesser-known French travelers, illustrating how the material and imaginative aspects of travel joined to form a space of desire in the French imagination.

Examines how journalists have portrayed electoral participation in the United States. The authors analyze depictions of voters in print news coverage over the course of eighteen presidential elections (1948-2016), describe people's reactions to those depictions, and share insights from their interviews with more than fifty elite journalists.

Examines commonplace conflicting beliefs that technology will either annihilate humanity or preserve humanity from annihilation. Argues that the paradoxical capacities of weapons influence how humanity understands violent conflict.

Explores the second period of the development of Quakerism, specifically focusing on changes in Quaker theology, authority and institutional structures, and political trajectories.

A historical biography of Don Antonio Yta, denounced in 1803 as a woman masquerading as a man. Examines the sex/gender complex within the Spanish Atlantic empire.

Using case studies from recent American military interventions, examines propaganda as an intertextual process, one in which discourse is recontextualized faithfully by multiple parties over time. Explores how messages are constructed, performed, and recontextualized in new and diverse situations.

Examines art that stands outside the margins of the art world, the critical and cultural conditions that made this exclusion possible, and how recognizing this radically transforms our understanding of contemporary art.

A collection of letters by Mary Penry (1735-1804), who immigrated to America from Wales and lived in Moravian communities for more than forty years. Offers a sustained view of the spiritual and social life of a single woman in early America.

Explores the connections among race, visual humor, and technologies of photography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with special attention to the reappropriation of racial humor by contemporary artists.

Charts the rediscovery and rigorous reassessment of the medieval Russo-Byzantine artistic tradition in Russia in the years 1860-1920. Explores the link between Byzantine revivalism and modernist experimentation, which ultimately made a significant and lasting impact on twentieth-century avant-garde movements.

Explores, in poetry and photographs, the effects of the natural gas boom and fracking in the small towns, fields, and forests of Appalachian Pennsylvania.

A photographic essay and narrative documenting the value, ecology, and importance of hemlock and beech trees in eastern North America. Describes the pests and pathogens that are killing them, and addresses solutions that are being sought by scientists and resource stewards.

A collection of essays on various aspects of the position of magic in the modern world. Essays explore the ways in which modernity has been defined in explicit opposition to magic and superstition, and the ways in which modern proponents of magic have worked to legitimate their practices.

A collection of essays that explore the role of performing animals in literature, theater, art, and other media prior to the twentieth century, and discuss recent theoretical work in animal studies, materialism, and posthumanism.

Documents the archaeological findings since 1985 that constitute the basis for interpreting the material culture of the western summit of Sepphoris, a site in the central Galilee region of Israel.

As the title indicates, this unique resource is a manual on comparative linguistics, with the examples taken exclusively from Semitic languages. It is an innovative volume that recalls the earlier tradition of textbooks of comparative philology, which, however, exclusively treated Indo-European languages. It is suited for students with at least a year of a Semitic language. By far the largest component of the book are the nine wordlists that provide the data to be manipulated by the student. Says reviewer Peter Daniels, the wordlists "constitute a unique resource for all of comparative linguistics-a considerable quantity of uniform data from a host of related languages. They would be useful for any class in comparative linguistics, not just for those interested specifically in Semitic." Scattered throughout the text are 25 exercises based on the wordlists that provide a good introduction to the methods of comparativists. Also included are paradigms of the phonological systems of ten Semitic languages as well as Coptic and a form of Berber. A bibliography that guides the student into further reading in Semitic linguistics completes the volume.

The 22 essays in this new and comprehensive study explore how notions of covenant, especially the Sinaitic covenant, flourished during the Neo-Babylonian, Persian, and early Hellenistic periods. Following the upheaval of the Davidic monarchy, the temple’s destruction, the disenfranchisement of the Jerusalem priesthood, the deportation of Judeans to other lands, the struggles of Judeans who remained in the land, and the limited returns of some Judean groups from exile, the covenant motif proved to be an increasingly influential symbol in Judean intellectual life. The contributors to this volume, drawn from many different countries including Canada, Germany, Israel, South Africa, Switzerland, and the United States, document how Judean writers working within historiographic, Levitical, prophetic, priestly, and sapiential circles creatively reworked older notions of covenant to invent a new way of understanding this idea. These writers examine how new conceptions of the covenant made between YHWH and Israel at Mt. Sinai play a significant role in the process of early Jewish identity formation. Others focus on how transformations in the Abrahamic, Davidic, and Priestly covenants responded to cultural changes within Judean society, both in the homeland and in the diaspora. Cumulatively, the studies of biblical writings, from Genesis to Chronicles, demonstrate how Jewish literature in this period developed a striking diversity of ideas related to covenantal themes.

Among the many religious acts condemned in the Hebrew Bible, child sacrifice stands out as particularly horrifying. The idea that any group of people would willingly sacrifice their own children to their god(s) is so contrary to modern moral sensibilities that it is difficult to imagine that such a practice could have ever existed. Nonetheless, the existence of biblical condemnation of these rites attests to the fact that some ancient Israelites in fact did sacrifice their children. Indeed, a close reading of the evidence-biblical, archaeological, epigraphic, etc.-indicates that there are at least three different types of Israelite child sacrifice, each with its own history, purpose, and function. In addition to examining the historical reality of Israelite child sacrifice, Dewrell's study also explores the biblical rhetoric condemning the practice. While nearly every tradition preserved in the Hebrew Bible rejects child sacrifice as abominable to Yahweh, the rhetorical strategies employed by the biblical writers vary to a surprising degree. Thus, even in arguing against the practice of child sacrifice, the biblical writers themselves often disagreed concerning why Yahweh condemned the rites and why they came to exist in the first place.

Christian readers of the Hebrew Bible are often faced with a troubling tension. On the one hand, they are convinced that this ancient text is relevant today, yet on the other, they remain perplexed at how this can be so, particularly when parts of it appear to condone violence. Barker's volume seeks to address this tension in two parts: (1) by defending a particular form of theological interpretation and (2) by applying this interpretive method to the imprecatory psalms.Barker suggests that the goal of theological interpretation is to discover God's voice in the text. While he recognizes that this goal could encourage a subjective methodology, Barker offers a hermeneutic that clearly locates God's voice in the text of Scripture. Utilizing the resources of speech act theory, Barker notes that texts convey meaning at a number of literary levels and that God's appropriation of speech acts at these levels is not necessarily uniform for each genre. He also discusses how the Christian canon alters the context of these ancient speech acts, both reshaping and enabling their continued function as divine discourse. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of this hermeneutic, Barker offers theological interpretations of Psalms 69 and 137. He demonstrates how christological fulfilment and the call to forgive one's enemies are determinative for a theological interpretation of these troubling psalms, concluding that they continue to form an essential part of God's voice that must not be ignored.

A survey of recent scholarship shows that historians who are skeptical about any “real” history of early Israel have disparaged the idea that Israel had an early presence in Transjordan. This skeptical stance, however, is by no means shared by everyone. Cross, for instance, asserted that the tribe of Reuben was a catalyst for Yahwism in the period preceding the rise of kings in Israel and Transjordan (in the 10th/9th centuries B.C.). Weaving together biblical, extrabiblical, and archaeological data available to him at the time (1988), Cross demonstrated the reality of an early Israelite presence in Transjordan. Ongoing excavations—at Tall al-’Umayri, the type-site for the Late Bronze–Iron I transition in the region bounded by the Wadi Zarqa in the north and the Wadi Mujib in the south, and at Tall Madaba, which had an early Iron I settlement—now confirm a tribal presence in these Transjordanian areas during the early Iron I. By bringing together applicable anthropological research and relevant biblical, extrabiblical, and archaeological data, Petter outlines a context-driven interpretive framework within which to plot tribal ethnic expressions in the past. From the perspective of the longue durée, we can see that frontier regions tend to exhibit episodic changes of hand: competing sides claimed legitimate ownership, sometimes by way of making the gods owners of the land.

What are the borders of the Promised Land in the Hebrew Bible? What drives and characterizes the descriptions given of them? The starting point for this research lies in the premise that, despite their detailed geographical nature, the biblical texts are not genuinely geographical documents. They are more appropriately to be understood and examined as literary texts composed in the service of an ideological agenda. In order to comprehend properly the idea of the Promised Land presented in the Hebrew Bible-its definitions, dimensions, and significance-we must understand that the descriptions belong to diverse literary genres, were composed according to various literary devices that require decoding, and that reflect a range of perspectives, outlooks, and notions.All the Boundaries of the Land provides engaging fresh perspectives on the variant views of the Promised Land in the interface between literature, history, geography, and ideology. It does not intend to answer the question of how the borders of the land altered throughout the course of history. The reader will find no maps or outlines in this book. The emphasis is on the literary tools that were employed by the biblical authors who described the borders, and the ideological motives that guided them.Erratum: All the Boundaries of the Land: The Promised Land in Biblical Thought in Light of the Ancient Near East was published with the support of the Israel Science Foundation (ISF). They funded the translation of the book into English and enabled Nili Wazana to make her research accessible to the wider scientific community. The preface to the book mistakenly fails to mention their contribution, thanking instead the Israel Academy of Science. Future editions will acknowledge the author''s gratitude to the Israel Science Foundation.