Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

In Quest for Conception, Marcia C. Inhorn portrays the poignant struggles of poor, urban Egyptian women and their attempts to overcome infertility. The author draws upon fifteen months of fieldwork in urban Egypt to present moving stories of infertile Muslim women whose tumultuous medical pilgrimages have yet to produce the desired pregnancies. Inhorn examines the devastating impact of infertility on the lives of these women, who are threatened with divorce by their husbands, harassed by their husbands'' families, and ostracized by neighbors.

"Kapchan's splendid enthnographic study of women's performance genres in Beni Mellal, Morocco, is an outstanding contribution to gender studies and to the understanding of Middle Eastern society."-Choice

"The History of the Lombards constitutes one of the most important literary sources for the early history of Europe, and the vision and energy of its author make it ... the most complex of the histories of the Germanic peoples between the sixth and the ninth centuries."-from the Introduction

Anthropologist Christopher Dole investigates the controversial position of religious healing in modern Turkey, demonstrating that the authority of the religious healer is deeply embedded within Turkey's history of secular reform, and that religious healing and secularism share a set of common stakes.

Sweet Liberty offers a history of Martinique and its relationship to metropolitan France during the final years of slavery in the French empire. It argues that an Atlantic-world approach reveals how race, slavery, class, and gender shaped what it meant to be French on both sides of the ocean.

The author of the hugely influential The Printing Press as an Agent of Change offers a magisterial and highly readable account of five centuries of ambivalent attitudes toward printing and printers. Once again, she makes a compelling case for the ways in which technological developments and cultural shifts are intimately related.

The first English translation of two captivity plays by Cervantes, set in Algiers and Constantinople. Featuring a lively cast of corsairs, captives, and renegades, they offer important insights into early modern Spain's conception of the world of Islam.