Books published by Pennsylvania State University Press

Through a study of the writings of the papal physician and art critic Giulio Mancini, explores early modern art collecting in Italy. Argues that art within domestic contexts was understood to create healthy bodies, minds, and societies through the mechanism of the imagination.

Provides a comprehensive account of how conflicts over taxes, spending, deficits, and debt have shaped American political development from the nation's founding until today.

A graphic memoir of the author's experiences of her mother's battle with dementia. Illustrates the two-way nature of storytelling as a process that heals both the giver and the receiver of story.

Known in Pennsylvania Dutch as brauche or braucherei, the folk-healing practice of powwowing was thought to draw upon the power of God to heal all manner of physical and spiritual ills. This work examines the practice of powwowing and shows that, contrary to popular belief, the practice of powwowing is active.

A collection of fiction and poetry representing the literature of cultures across Europe, including Shetland Scots, Occitan, Latvian, Polish, Armenian, Italian, Hungarian, German, Slovenian, Faroese and Icelandic.

A collection of essays on the early modern English writer, proto-feminist, and rhetorician Mary Astell. Includes discussions on human nature, equality, rationality, power, freedom, friendship, marriage, and education.

Explores the benefits of utilizing field methods for studying rhetoric as a complement to text-based approaches in order to address questions about text, context, audience, judgment and ethics.

An account of the Lenni Lenape and other American Indian tribes in the mid-Atlantic region by Reverend John Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary based in Ohio and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. First published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1818.

A history of early German immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania in the beginning of the eighteenth century, with a particular focus on the group of Pietist mystics who emigrated to America in 1694. First published in 1895.

The memoirs and stories of George W. Brown, who was deeply involved in the oil industry in Pennsylvania in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First published in 1911 by the Derrick Publishing Company.

A collection of stories about wolves in Pennsylvania, originally published in 1914. Includes interviews with some of the state's famous wolf hunters and period photographs of the hunters and their prey.

An English translation of Alva Ixtlilxochitl's "Thirteenth Relation," an early seventeenth-century narrative of the conquest of Mexico from Hernan Cortes's arrival in 1519 through his expedition into Central America in 1524.

Analyzes how chroniclers of the First Crusade attempted to represent the enterprise as a "holy war." Focuses on accounts of miracles, especially the intervention of saints in the battle of Antioch; explores how the chroniclers related the crusade to biblical events.

Explores the metaphorical power of time and space in Jewish modernist poetry in Hebrew and Yiddish as a response to the experience of exile and landlessness, and as a means of furthering modernism's exploration of the self and its relation to community, nation, and the world.

An exploration of the literary and cinematic representations of the kibbutz movement in Israel. Authors discussed include Amos Oz, Savyon Liebrecht, Nathan Shaham, Avraham Balaban, Atallah Mansour, Eli Amir, and Batya Gur. Directors discussed include Yitzhak Yeshurun, Akiva Tevet, Dror Shaul, and Jonathan Paz.

Examines the medical discourse on abortion in the United States from the 1800s to the 1960s. Demonstrates that abortion was seen as a sign of social pathology indicating undoing of civilization.

Explores Shrine Madonnas, late medieval statues of the Virgin Mary that split open to reveal richly carved and painted interiors. Analyzes the changing roles of vision and sensation in the complex performative ways in which audiences engaged with devotional art, both in public and in private.

Explores how thinking about pets in eighteenth-century Britain reflected and influenced the great social and cultural debates of the day, including struggles over gender, race, class, and national identity.

Investigates the psychological foundations of human sociability as they are treated in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Argues that Rousseau provides a pessimistic, or tragic, teaching concerning the nature and scope of human connectedness.

A collection of essays exploring the nature and experience of love, its contradictions and limits, and its material and ideal forms. Drawing from leading contemporary Continental philosophers, contributors focus on love as it relates to such phenomena as trust, abuse, grief, death, hatred, politics, and desire.

A collection of essays examining the writings of William James. Provides a reinterpretation of pragmatism to devise philosophical resources for pragmatist feminism that challenge sexism and male privilege.

A collection of essays examining the writings of William James. Provides a reinterpretation of pragmatism to devise philosophical resources for pragmatist feminism that challenge sexism and male privilege.

Focuses on the writings of John Locke, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and Herbert Spencer to explore how the discipline of rhetoric connected the economics and ethics of capitalism from the British Enlightenment through the nineteenth century.

Investigates the scandalous 1731 trial in which a young woman in the south of France accused her Jesuit confessor of seduction, heresy, abortion, and bewitchment. Examines this trial in the context of growing public disenchantment with the church and the monarchy.

An interpretive approach to the study of mystical experience. Compares the experiences of Meister Eckhart, Ibn Arabi, and Hui-neng to reveal commonalities that have provocative implications for our understanding of consciousness.

Examines U.S. immigration as a rhetorical process inventing persons and communities in reference to space and place. Engages immigration in media and popular culture; the construction of immigrant experiences in public discourse; and the effects of fear, violence, and exclusion on immigrant and non-immigrant communities.

A history of the Spanish Gothic cathedral of Toledo. Balances architectural history with close scrutiny of the cathedral's liturgy and cults, the sculpture on its portals and choir enclosure, its royal tombs, and its diverse treasury and textiles.

Examines how museum anthropologists' scientific understandings of indigenous cultures during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries impacted creole Argentines' visions of national heritage and identity.

Explores artistic depictions of the ostrich from ancient Egypt to the Renaissance works of Raphael. Traces the history of shifting interpretations given to the ostrich in scientific texts, literature, and religious writings.