Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

This study offers a new reading of the development of modern authorship in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, through a detailed reexamination of one of the central mythologies of this evolution: the author's passage from dependence on patronage to the autonomy of the market.

The Blacks of Premodern China describes the earliest Chinese encounters with peoples regarded as black. It focuses on the first exposure of Chinese to blacks hailing from East Africa, chiefly from today's Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania, who arrived in China as slaves between the seventh and seventeenth centuries C.E.

Who owns the tabula picta, the painted tablet? The owner of the tablet? Or to the person who painted it? This meticulous analysis of how medieval jurists responded to these questions is a major a contribution to the history of the proprietary rights to artistic works and to the history of ideas.

The miraculous blends with the mundane in this book as the Samburu continue their day-to-day twenty-first-century existence. Straight describes miracles inside the cultural logic that makes them possible, questioning how anthropology can best engage with the improbable.

Addressing Christian-Muslim relations generally, as well as the histories of reading and the book, Burman offers a balanced and hands-on picture of the ways Europeans read the sacred text of Islam.

The fourteen essays in this collection explore the place of women in archaeology in the twentieth century, arguing that they have largely been excluded from "an essentially all-male establishment."

Maria Rosa Menocal argues that Arabic culture was a central and shaping phenomenon in medieval Europe.

Focusing on the rich heritage of art-making in the eighteenth century, this illustrated book positions both well-known painters and unknown artisans within the framework of their economic lives, their families, and the geographies through which they moved as they created notable careers and memorable objects.