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.

Examines two anonymous manuscripts of magic produced in Elizabethan England: the Antiphoner Notebook and the Boxgrove Manual. Explores how scribes assembled these texts within wider cultural developments surrounding early modern forms of magic.

"Emery and Claire Yass Publications in Archaeology of the Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University."--Title page.

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.

A collection of essays on the work of Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel, focusing on his ethics of liberation.

Explores the western European idea of the witches' sabbath, based on translations of five texts dating from the 1430s, and examines how these texts went on to influence conceptions of diabolical witchcraft for centuries to come.

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.

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.

Reconsiders Sherlock Holmes in light of Arthur Conan Doyle's spiritualism. Brings together literary study and author biography to return the iconic Holmes to his mystical origins.

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.

Explores how certain educated northern Europeans in the first half of the sixteenth century increasingly saw their world as disharmonious and inclusive of mutual contradiction. Examines how early modern writers grappled with the problem of cultural, religious, and cosmological difference in relation to notions of universals and the divine.

A fictionalized narrative, in graphic novel format, of the author's experiences as a quadriplegic following injuries he sustained from an accident.

A narrative, in graphic novel form, of a young woman coming of age while struggling with an eating disorder and family dysfunction. Documents the author's battle with body dysmorphic disorder, anorexia nervosa, and bulimia, which plagued her from her childhood through to adulthood.

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.

A collection of essays that evaluate the continued relevance of iconographic studies within current art-historical scholarship by exploring the fluidity of iconography itself.

A collection of essays focusing on the relationship between concepts of the holy and the unholy in western European medieval culture. Demonstrates how religion, magic, and science were all modes of engagement with a natural world that was understood to be divinely created and infused with mysterious power.