Books published by Pennsylvania State University Press

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.

An interdisciplinary exploration of white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater from the 1500s through the 1700s.

Explores the work of American artists since 1970 who have created an anti-rape, anti-incest counternarrative in opposition to the acceptance of sexual violence against women.

An interdisciplinary exploration of the diverse discourse on divine sonship in ancient Jewish and Christian literature. Authors focus on a range of issues including messianism, deification, eschatological figures, Jesus, interreligious polemics, and the Roman and Jewish backgrounds of early Christian writers and the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Examines the book of Ecclesiastes, arguing that it may have served as a provocative voice for, or as a catalyst to, the emergence of apocalyptic eschatology and later sectarian conflicts within Judaism in the mid-Second Temple period.

An examination of the recognition formula 'you/they shall know that I am Yahweh' as a dominant feature of Ezekiel's prophecy. Reviews past scholarship, details of the refrain's usage, and the origin of the formula.

A new study of Old Testament atonement in the Priestly Literature that employs a modified text-immanent strategy to investigate how sacrifice works. Focuses on Priestly Torah texts found in Leviticus 1-16, Exodus and Numbers.

Identifies and analyzes the Ugaritic terms most commonly used to talk about life and mortality in order to construct a more representative framework of the ancient perspective on these topics.

Explores women's conceptions of citizenship as articulated in their speeches at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Illustrates how, in addition to working for their own enfranchisement, women also modeled practices of democratic citizenship beyond the ballot.

Documents the Lahav Research Project's work at Tell Halif in Southern Israel, focusing on the team's excavations and related regional ethnographic research at adjacent Khirbet Khuweilifeh, an early twentieth-century settlement of Bedouin and Arab fellahin clients.

Investigates the governmental administrative systems of the Late Babylonian period, drawing on S. N. Eisenstadt's model of historical bureaucratic empires to show that the governmental systems of this period developed an early form of administrative law.

The second and final volume of scientific and interdisciplinary reports on the excavations and research conducted at Tell el-Borg, north Sinai, between 1998 and 2008, focusing on cemetery areas.

A collection of essays honoring the biblical scholar Ben C. Ollenburger on the topic of the Bible and creation, the subject of much of Ollenburger's scholarly career.

Explores Paul's view of the Mosaic law's relationship to Gentile Christians, and explores the logic of Paul's approach, comparing his view on this issue to views found in the Old Testament and Second Temple Jewish literature.

Explores the debate over whether Paul was a faithful follower of Jesus or a corruptor of Jesus's message. Focuses on an element of similarity between the two men: the place of miracles in their ministries.

Explores a narrative pattern in which storytellers revisit instances of genocide and extinction not simply to reveal historical erasures of whole populations but also to rearticulate lifeways premised on cross-species interdependence. Focuses on recovering a sense of affective bonds shared across species lines.

Explores the practices of ecological art, a genre addressing the widespread public concern with rapid climate change and related environmental issues. Examines connections and divergences between contemporary eco art, land art of the 1960s and '70s, and the historical genre of landscape painting.

The 4th-century teacher, Didymus the Blind, enjoyed a fruitful life as head of an episcopally-sanctioned school in Alexandria. Author of numerous dogmatic treatises and exegetical works, Didymus was considered a stalwart defender of the Nicene faith in his heyday. He duly attracted the likes of Jerome and Rufinus to his school. Contemporary scholarship has focused most of its attention on understanding him as an exegete, especially focusing on his exegetical vocabulary and the driving assumptions behind his particular method of reading Scripture. The theological literature has been somewhat neglected. In this study, Jonathan Hicks makes the claim that Didymus's exegesis can only be understood in all its fullness in light of his theological commitments. His acute differences with Theodore of Mopsuestia on the proper reading of the prophet Zechariah cannot be understood as merely methodological. Animating Didymus's reading of the prophet is a lively understanding of Trinitarian missions. Recognizing the comings of the Son and the Spirit to Israel is essential in locating the prophet's message properly within the one divine economy of revelation and salvation that culminates in the Incarnation of Christ. Hicks argues that Didymus is instructive here for today's Church both on the level of praxis (we should adopt some of his reading practices) and on the level of theoria (his Trinitarian account of Scripture's origin and ends is fundamental to a fully Christian understanding of what Scripture is).

A comprehensive documentation and study of a corpus of eighteen monumental highland reliefs belonging to the Elamite civilization, ranging from the seventeenth to the sixth century BC.

Pejoratively referred to as "idols" in the "Hebrew Bible" and in western tradition, the cult image occupied a central place in the cultures of the ancient Near East. This work examines the topic within different ancient Near Eastern cultures, and provides a modern analogy as counterpoint.

A reassessment of the regency of Queen Mariana of Austria (1634-1696) during the minority of her son, King Carlos II of Spain, offering a new perspective on the Spanish monarchy in the later seventeenth century.

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.

Explores how, in the Americas, people of African birth or descent found spiritual and social empowerment in the orbit of the Church. Draws connections between Afro-Catholic festivals and their precedents in the early modern Christian kingdom of Kongo.

A comprehensive overview of the writings of Francis Daniel Pastorius, founder of Germantown, lawyer, educator, and early modern polymath. Includes many of Pastorius's unpublished manuscripts as well as new translations of German-language tracts printed in his lifetime.