Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

The city of Hebron is important to Jewish, Islamic, and Christian traditions as home to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the burial site of three biblical couples: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah. Today, Hebron is one of the epicenters of the Israel-Palestine conflict, consisting of two unequal populations: a traditional Palestinian majority without citizenship, and a fundamentalist Jewish settler minority with full legal rights. Contemporary Jewish settler practices and sensibilities, legal gray zones, and ruling complicities have remade Hebron into a divided Palestinian city surrounded by a landscape of fragmented, militarized strongholds.In Settling Hebron, Tamara Neuman examines how religion functions as ideology in Hebron, with a focus on Jewish settler expansion and its close but ambivalent relationship to the Israeli state. Neuman presents the first critical ethnography of the Jewish settler populations in Kiryat Arba and the adjacent Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Hebron,considered by many Israelis as the most "ideological" of settlements. Through extensive fieldwork, interviews with settlers, soldiers, displaced Palestinian urban residents and farmers as well as archival research, Neuman challenges dismissive portraits of settlers as rigid, fanatical adherents of an anachronistic worldview. At the same time, she reveals the extent of disconnection between these settler communities and mainstream Modern Orthodox Judaism, both of which interpret written sources on the sacredness of land—biblical texts, rabbinic commentary, and mystical traditions—in radically different ways. Neuman also traces the violent results of a settler formation, Palestinian responses to settler encroachment, and the connection between ideological settlement and economic processes. Settling Hebron explores the complexity of Hebron''s Jewish settler community in its own right—through its routine practices and rituals, its most extreme instances of fundamentalist revision and violence, and its strategic relationships with successive Israeli governments.

Composed at the height of the Hundred Years War by Geoffroi de Charny, one of the most respected knights of his age, A Knight's Own Book of Chivalry is an invaluable guide to fourteenth-century knighthood.

An engaging narrative history of the origins of formal education in the West. Winner of the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, awarded by the American Philosophical Society.

This book brings together five of Goffman's seminal essays: "Replies and Responses," "Response Cries," "Footing," "The Lecture," and "Radio Talk."

"Kramer ranked among the world's foremost Sumerologists... The book will interest both the scholar and the general educated reader."-Religious Studies Bulletin

Through a series of deeply researched case studies on the history of international political economy, Diplomacy and Capitalism takes measure of the significance and complexity of the crucial questions of wealth and power in the United States and the world in the twentieth century.

Human Rights as Human Independence offers a comprehensive, systematic, and complete account of the nature, sources, and scope of human rights that can be used to interpret international documents and make informed decisions about how human rights practice must be continued in the years to come.

Embodying the Soul argues that classical medicine was reconfigured as a sacred Christian art across the Carolingian Empire in the ninth century, becoming not simply a method of physical rehabilitation but also a tool of spiritual transformation.

Balaam's Ass attempts the first comprehensive overview of religious writing in early England's vernacular languages-Old English, Insular French, and Middle English-between the ninth and sixteenth centuries. In this first of three volumes, Watson focuses on the first generation of these writings, in Old English and early Middle English.

City of Dispossessions argues that the dispossession of Native Americans and African Americans explains the development of modern U.S. cities, including Detroit. By comparing Black and Indigenous experiences, we gain a better understanding of the histories of race relations, settler colonialism, and urban development.

In The Crucified Book, Anne Kreps shows how the Gospel of Truth, a second-century text associated with the Christian Platonist Valentinus, and its ideas about the nature of authoritative writing engaged with Greco-Roman culture and cohered with Jewish and Christian ideas about books in antiquity.

In Cultures of Witnessing, Emma Lipton considers the plays that were performed in the streets of York on the Feast of Corpus Christi from the late fourteenth century until the third quarter of the sixteenth and shows how civic performance and the legal theory and practice of witnessing promoted a shared sense of urban citizenship.

In her eighteenth-century medical recipe manuscript, the Philadelphia healer Elizabeth Coates Paschall asserted her ingenuity and authority with the bold strokes of her pen. Paschall developed an extensive healing practice, consulted medical texts, and conducted experiments based on personal observations. As British North Americäs premier city of medicine and science, Philadelphia offered Paschall a nurturing environment enriched by diverse healing cultures and the Quaker values of gender equality and women¿s education. She participated in transatlantic medical and scientific networks with her friend, Benjamin Franklin. Paschall was not unique, however. Women Healers recovers numerous women of European, African, and Native American descent who provided the bulk of health care in the greater Philadelphia area for centuries.Although the history of women practitioners often begins with the 1850 founding of Philadelphiäs Female Medical College, the first women¿s medical school in the United States, these students merely continued the legacies of women like Paschall. Remarkably, though, the lives and work of early American female practitioners have gone largely unexplored. While some sources depict these women as amateurs whose influence declined, Susan Brandt documents women¿s authoritative medical work that continued well into the nineteenth century. Spanning a century and a half, Women Healers traces the transmission of European women¿s medical remedies to the Delaware Valley where they blended with African and Indigenous women¿s practices, forming hybrid healing cultures.Drawing on extensive archival research, Brandt demonstrates that women healers were not inflexible traditional practitioners destined to fall victim to the onward march of Enlightenment science, capitalism, and medical professionalization. Instead, women of various classes and ethnicities found new sources of healing authority, engaged in the consumer medical marketplace, and resisted physicians¿ attempts to marginalize them. Brandt reveals that women healers participated actively in medical and scientific knowledge production and the transition to market capitalism.

In Won in Translation Roger Chartier considers the mobility of the early modern text and the plurality of circulating versions of the same work. The agent for both is translation, for through their lexical, aesthetic, and cultural decisions, translators always assign new meaning or new status to what they translate.

In Experts in the Age of Anxiety, Joshua Moses chronicles the rise of disaster-related spiritual expertise in the years following the attacks of 9/11 and provides a lens through which to understand the historical dimensions of disaster-related trauma, its treatment, and the ways that therapeutic and spiritual practices imply politics.

The Nazi regime imagined film as a powerful tool to shape National Socialist subjects. Tracing discourses around film production and film consumption in the city of Hamburg, On Screen and Off illustrates how Nazi ideology was envisaged, imagined, experienced, and occasionally even fought over.

In The Textual Effects of David Walker's "Appeal" Marcy J. Dinius offers the first in-depth analysis of Walker's argumentatively and typographically radical pamphlet and its direct influence on five Black and Indigenous activist authors, Maria W. Stewart, William Apess, William Paul Quinn, Henry Highland Garnet, and Paola Brown.

Between the independence of the colonies and the start of the Jacksonian age, American readers consumed an enormous number of literary texts called "fragments."American Fragments argues that this archive of deliberately unfinished writing reimagined the place of marginalized individuals in a country that was itself still unfinished.

Race, in the early modern period, is a concept at the crossroads of a set of overlapping concerns of lineage, religion, and nation. Bad Humor charts how these concerns converged around a pseudoscientific system that confirmed the absolute difference between Protestants and Catholics and justified English colonial domination.

Although the Enlightenment had seemed to bring an end to the belief that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes, charges of the so-called blood libel continued on either side of the turn to the twentieth century. Hillel J. Kieval examines four cases to consider how discredited beliefs became plausible to educated European elites.

In A Feast of Flowers, Christopher Krupa focuses on Ecuador's booming cut-flower sector and shows how capitalist expansion bound the Global South to new modes of financial dependency and subjected indigenous workers to elaborate forms of racial "improvement" and uplift.

Although early modern England claimed to have "too pure an Air for Slaves to breathe in," slavery was a quintessentially English phenomenon, writes Urvashi Chakravarty. She argues that England laid the conceptual groundwork for racialized slavery as it interrogated the classical inheritances and contemporary contexts for bondage.

In After the Black Death, Susan L. Einbinder uncovers Jewish responses to plague and violence in fourteenth-century Provence and Iberia, discovering a fundamental continuity in Jewish worldview and means of expression.