Books published by Pennsylvania State University Press

Examines seventeenth-century sculpture in Rome. Focuses on questions of historical context and criticism, including the interaction of theory and practice, the creative roles of sculptors and patrons, the relationship of sculpture to antique models and to contemporary painting, and contextual meaning and reception.

Investigates how students in a clinical legal education program learned to advocate effectively and ethically with clients abused by intimate partners. Demonstrates the importance of valuing clients as experts in their own lives and as equal partners in decision making.

Explores the role of writer Gwendolyn Bennett as an important contributor to the Harlem Renaissance. Includes Bennett's published and unpublished poetry, fiction, essays, diaries, letters, and artwork.

The first complete English translation and annotated study of Bartolome de Las Casas's 1552 Confesionario. Explores its history and its guidelines for confessors administering the sacrament of confession to conquistadores, encomenderos, slaveholders, settlers, and others who had harmed indigenous peoples.

Explores the role of writer Gwendolyn Bennett as an important contributor to the Harlem Renaissance. Includes Bennett's published and unpublished poetry, fiction, essays, diaries, letters, and artwork.

Explores the multiple religious influences on Billie Holiday's life and sound, combining elements of biography with the history of race and American music.

Examines art and literature of the Americas through the lens of the questionnaire, a genre as central as the manifesto to the history of the avant-garde. Demonstrates how modernism and the avant-garde were debated at the very moment of their development and consolidation.

Explores the myriad ways that people in the nineteenth century grappled with questions of learning, belonging, civic participation, and deliberation. Focuses on the dynamics of gender, race, region, and religion, and how individuals and groups often excluded from established institutions developed knowledge useful for public life.

Analyzes the tensions within the contemporary Anglican Communion, addresses the theological arguments and social forces involved, and explores the dynamics of religious conflict in a global era.

Examines the rhetorical activity that preceded the early twentieth-century emergence of the word hormone and the impact of this word on expert understandings of women's health.

A collection of essays on nature observations at the Shaver's Creek Environmental Center, focusing on deepening the connection of personal and cultural meanings to a specific place through a process of sustained close attention.

Explores the work of the astrologer-physician and Anglican rector Richard Napier (1559-1634). Examines Napier's medical and magical practices in their larger context and shows how the physician incorporated both astral and ritual magic into his medicine.

English translation of an anonymous thirteenth-century French poem in which a woman desperate to bear a child appeals to the devil for help. Originally written in octosyllabic rhymed couplets, this translation uses free verse.

Explores the contributions of Evan Pugh (1828-1864), founding president of today's Pennsylvania State University, in quickly building it into America's first scientifically based agricultural college.

Explores the ways in which visual imagery was used for animal advocacy campaigns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the ways in which these images were created, circulated, and consumed in a wide range of cultural contexts.

An English translation of Benjamin Hoffmann's French monograph L'Amerique posthume. Examines the literary idealization of a lost American past in eighteenth-century French literature.

Examines U.S. obscenity trials in the early twentieth century and how they framed a wide-ranging debate about the printed word's power to deprave, offend, and shape behavior.

Recounts the histories of German clockwork automata, which were given as gifts and collected in the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and Mughal Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

A collection of essays investigating photography's role in the evolution of media and communication in the nineteenth century.

Explores the formation of public and private collections of Spanish Colonial and modern Latin American art throughout the United States, and the impact of the ever-changing political landscape of Latin American countries.

A multidisciplinary interpretation of representations of magic in fourteenth-century romances, and how these texts link magic, spectacle, and morality in distinctive ways. By representing supernatural marvels in vivid visual detail, these texts encourage reactions of wonder that have moral effects within and beyond the narrative.

Focuses on costumbrismo, a cultural trend in Latin America and Spain toward representing local customs, types, and scenes of everyday life in the visual arts and literature, to examine the shifting terms of Mexican identity in the nineteenth century.