Books published by Pennsylvania State University Press

A collection of essays on civil religion in modern political philosophy, exploring the engagement between modern thought and the Christian tradition.

A complete corpus of the extant royal inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian kings Ame l-Marduk (561-560 BC), Neriglissar (559-556 BC), and Nabonidus (555-539 BC), who were three of the last native kings of Babylonia before the conquest of Cyrus the Great.

A collection of essays examining transatlantic Quakerism in the eighteenth century, a period during which Quakers became increasingly sectarian even as they expanded their engagement with worldly affairs.

Examines legal documents and magic texts relevant to two cases where authorities in Tudor England confronted practicing magicians. Explores how magicians thought about the world, where they got their ideas, and how their magic was supposed to work.

A collection of essays exploring the subject of friendship in Jewish culture, history, and religion from ancient Israel to the twenty-first century.

Explores the late medieval concepts of absence and void, with a special focus on the materiality of emptiness in later medieval manuscripts.

Studies Romanesque effigies as a distinctive form of medieval sculpture, emphasizing the early twelfth century as a time of rapid change in the art, culture, and politics of northern Europe.

Examines sixty-eight women artists in early modern Bologna, revealing how they obtained public commissions and expanded beyond the portrait subjects to which women were traditionally confined. Uses new methodological models for considering gender and art in early modern Italy.

In this book, Jeffrey Merrick brings together a rich array of primary-source documents-many of which are published or translated here for the first time-that depict in detail the policing of same-sex populations in eighteenth-century France and the ways in which Parisians regarded what they called sodomy or pederasty and tribadism. Taken together, these documents suggest that male and female same-sex relations played a more visible public role in Enlightenment-era society than was previously believed.The translated and annotated sources included here show how robust the same-sex subculture was in eighteenth-century Paris, as well as how widespread the policing of sodomy was at the time. Part 1 includes archival police records from the 1720s to the 1780s that show how the police attempted to manage sodomitical activity through surveillance and repression; part 2 includes excerpts from treatises and encyclopedias, published nouvelles (collections of news) and libelles (libelous writings), fictive portrayals, and Enlightenment treatments of the topic that include calls for legal reform. Together these sources show how contemporaries understood same-sex relations in multiple contexts and cultures, including their own. The resulting volume is an unprecedented look at the role of same-sex relations in the culture and society of the era.The product of years of archival research curated, translated, and annotated by a premier expert in the field, Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France provides a foundational primary text for the study and teaching of the history of sexuality.

A translation and revision of Josef Tropper's Altathiopisch: Grammatik des Ge'ez mit UEbungstexten und Glossar, providing a comprehensive grammar of Classical Ethiopic, the historical language of Ethiopian Christianity. Uses both the Ethiopian script and transliterations to aid the reader's understanding of the language.

A collection of short comics about the COVID-19 pandemic. Diverse artists address disruptions in work, school, and family life as well as failures in public policy, racial biases, and systemic inequalities revealed by the pandemic.

A graphic novel exploring Texaco's involvement in the Amazon, as well as the ensuing legal battles between the oil company, the Ecuadorian government, and the region's inhabitants, from the perspective of Ecuadorian lawyer and activist Pablo Fajardo.

An account in graphic novel format, based on the author's own experiences, of a boy coping with his mother' suffering from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, showing how mental illness can both tear families apart and reaffirm the bonds of love.

A graphic novel exploring amputation, revealing details about famous amputees throughout history, the invention of the tourniquet, phantom limb syndrome, types of prostheses, and transhumanist technologies.

A graphic novel exploring the scientific details and unusual facts of sexual reproduction among various species.