Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

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.

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

The Virginia Venture is an innovative exploration of how a wider public of women, children, and men across English society contributed to the foundation of the first permanent English colony in America: Jamestown, Virginia. Drawing on sources from dozens of archives in the United States and England, it provides a fresh perspective on how capital and labor were mobilized to help build the colony¿not from the perspective of elite investors alone, but from the point of view of ordinary people across the country. Women and the laboring poor have been overlooked in these efforts: The Virginia Venture brings them center stage.As well as exploring how society at home supported colonization, the book examines the impact that colonization had on English society, including changes in attitudes and behaviors¿from the provision of poor relief to domestic tobacco cultivation. The book shows that as English society became more tightly invested in colonization in America, this sparked contestations over the prioritization of ¿English¿ and ¿American¿ interests. English social history in the seventeenth century cannot be understood without this imperial perspective.The Virginia Venture is essential reading for scholars of English social and imperial history and early American history. It draws on the methods of transatlantic history, showing the intimate connections between England and America, but it is deeply rooted in the social history archive of England. It demonstrates how English archives can be used, to their fullest extent, to illuminate this crucial period of American history.

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.

In Inventing William of Norwich Heather Blurton offers a revisionist reading of Thomas Monmouth's account of the saint's life that contains the earliest account of a Christian child ritually murdered by Jews. She demonstrates how innovations in literary forms in the twelfth century shaped the articulation of medieval antisemitism.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.