Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

I Remember is a first-hand account of the world of black American music told by a man who has been part of that world for eighty years. Clyde E. B. Bernhardt worked with a number of bands, including King Oliver, Marion Hard, Cecil Scott, the Bascomb Brothers, and Joe Garland. He started his own band, the Blue Blazers, in 1946 and formed the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band in 1972.The book is a primary document that provides information about a part of the history of American music for which there is little documentation.

Catherine Burroughs reveals how a concern with the performative aspects of daily life and the movement between public and private spheres produced a notion of theater that complicates the Romantic opposition between "closet" and "stage."

In this book Thomas H. Bestul constructs the literary history of the Latin Passion narratives, placing them within their social, cultural, and historical contexts. He examines the ways in which the Passion is narrated and renarrated in devotional treatises, paying particular attention to the modifications and enlargements of the narrative of the Passion as it is presented in the canonical gospels. Of particular interest to Bestul are the representations of Jews, women, and the body of the crucified Christ. Bestul argues that the greatly enlarged role of the Jews in the Passion narratives of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is connected to the rising anti-Judaism of the period. He explores how the representations of women, particularly the Virgin Mary, express cultural values about the place of women in late medieval society and reveal an increased interest in female subjectivity.

Examines a set of five twelfth-century romance texts—complete and fragmentary, canonical and now neglected, long and short—to map out the characteristics and boundaries of the genre in its formative period.

Herman Beavers offers a richly nuanced study of Ernes J. Gaines, James Alan McPherson, and Ralph Ellison as writers who have found ways to invest circumstances that might otherwise be seen as sites of squalor or despair with a sense of cultural vitality. He examines the Ellisonian themes and motifs the two later writers take up in their fiction, and looks at Ellison''s influence on the strategies they enact to construct themselves as American writers.For Beavers, the fictions of Ellison, Gaines, and McPherson are peopled by characters who value acts of storytelling and whose stories frame a fuller, more complex, and more inclusive version of American identity than those the dominant white culture has allowed.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleBartels focuses on Marlowe''s preoccupation with "strangers" and "strange" lands, and his use—and subversion—of Elizabethan stereotypes. Setting Marlovian drama in the context of England''s nascent imperialism, Bartels probes the significance of the alien as the vital presence on the Renaissance stage and within Renaissance society.

Originally published in 1939 and available here in English, Land and Lordship has been one of the most influential works of the twentieth-century medieval scholarship.

"Well argued, clearly written, with interesting emphases and ambitious breadth, this excellent book maintains a uniformly high level of scholarship."-Choice

In The Fury of Men''s Gullets, Bruce Boehrer explores the poet''s fascination with alimentary matters and the ways in which such references describe Jonson''s personal and cultural transformation. In his wide-ranging examination of Jonson''s plays, prose, and nondramatic verse, Boehrer discusses the sociohistorical significance of food, the politics of conspicuous consumption, the infrastructure of Jacobean London, and pertinent aspects of Renaissance medical practice and physiological theory. The Fury of Men''s Gullets uniquely interprets Jonson''s construction of early modern English literary sensibility.

As the earliest major monument of the customary law in the region to the south and southwest of the Ile de France, the book known as the Etablissements de Saint Louis greatly amplifies our knowledge of feudal and private law in the French kingdom. Frequently cited by legal historians, it has nonetheless remained inaccessible to readers unable to master its difficult Old French. Now, F. R. P. Akehurst presents the text''s first English translation, making this vital component of the vernacular law of thirteenth century France available to a wide range of scholars.A hybrid text, the Etablissements was probably compiled by a lawyer around the year 1273. The book takes its name from its first part, a set of nine ordinances of Louis IX giving the rules of procedure for the court of the Chatelet in Paris. The second part, made up of one hundred and sixty-six short chapters, is a collection of the customary laws of the Touraine-Anjou region; the thirty-eight chapters of the third section record the laws of the Orleans region. Whereas the Touraine-Anjou material presents a broad treatment of many aspects of the law, the Orleans customary reveals a preoccupation with problems of jurisdiction in a region where the king and local authorities were in sharp competition for power.

Joseph Childers contends that novels such as Benjamin Disraeli''s Coningsby, Elizabeth Gaskell''s Mary Barton, and Charles Kingsley''s Alton Locke were in direct competition with other forms of public discourse for interpretive dominance of their age. Childers examines the interactions between the novel and a set of texts generated by parliamentary and radical politics, the sanitation reform movement, and religion. Reversing the position of earlier studies of this period, he argues that the novel was in fact constitutive of—and often provided the model for—texts as diverse as the political agendas of Robert Peel and T. B. Macaulay or Edwin Chadwick''s enormously important Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, with its seemingly encyclopedic description of the conditions of poverty.

In Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England, Bruce Thomas Boehrer argues that a preoccupation with incest is built not the dominant social and cultural concerns of early modern England. Proceeding from a study of Henry III''s divorce and succession legislation, through the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, this work examines the interrelation between family politics and literary expression in and around the English royal court.

Showing Like a Queen argues that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton turned the political problem of queenship to their advantage.

The historical displacement of charity by philanthropy represents a radical transformation in how we think about voluntary giving. The consequences of this shift have been socially revolutionary.

Drawing on theology, alchemy, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary criticism, Shakespeare's Perfume explores how the history of aesthetics and the history of sexuality are fundamentally connected.

Stanley Finger uncovers the instrumental role that Benjamin Franklin-scientist, inventor, publisher, and statesman-played in the development of the healing arts, giving preventive and bedside medicine, hospital care, and even personal hygiene a modern look that changed the face of medical care in both America and Europe.

How did the GOP trounce the Democrats in 2014? Acclaimed political analyst Ed Kilgore crunches the data, examines structural factors, places the vote in historical context, and reflects on implications for the 2016 presidential race in this bracing commentary on the recent Republican sweep.

In this provocative and insightful book, constitutional scholar and journalist Garrett Epps reviews the key decisions of the 2013-2014 Supreme Court term, highlighting one opinion or dissent from each Justice to illuminate the political and ideological views that prevail on the Court.

In Roads to Health, G. Geltner demonstrates that urban dwellers in medieval Italy had a keen sense of the dangers to their health posed by conditions of overcrowding, shortages of food and clean water, air pollution, and the improper disposal of human and animal waste. He consults scientific, narrative, and normative sources that detailed and consistently denounced the physical and environmental hazards urban communities faced: latrines improperly installed and sewers blocked; animals left to roam free and carcasses left rotting on public byways; and thoroughfares congested by artisanal and commercial activities that impeded circulation, polluted waterways, and raised miasmas. However, as Geltner shows, numerous administrative records also offer ample evidence of the concrete measures cities took to ameliorate unhealthy conditions. Toiling on the frontlines were public functionaries generally known as viarii, or "road-masters," appointed to maintain their community''s infrastructures and police pertinent human and animal behavior. Operating on a parallel track were the camparii, or "field-masters," charged with protecting the city''s hinterlands and thereby the quality of what would reach urban markets, taverns, ovens, and mills.Roads to Health provides a critical overview of the mandates and activities of the viarii and camparii as enforcers of preventive health and safety policies between roughly 1250 and 1500, and offers three extended case studies, for Lucca, Bologna, and the smaller Piedmont town of Pinerolo. In telling their stories, Geltner contends that preventive health practices, while scientifically informed, emerged neither solely from a centralized regime nor as a reaction to the onset of the Black Death. Instead, they were typically negotiated by diverse stakeholders, including neighborhood residents, officials, artisans, and clergymen, and fostered throughout the centuries by a steady concern for people''s greater health.

"A significant addition to the texts of later medieval European law available in English."-Paul Brand, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and Research Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, London

French argues that medieval laywomen both coped with the chaotic changes following the plague and justified their own changing behavior by participating in local religion. Through active engagement in the parish church, the basic unit of public worship, women promoted and validated their own interests and responsibilities.

Between 1950 and 1972, American and European writers came to envision consumer culture in fresh, provocative ways. Across national boundaries, they shifted attention from condemnation to critical appreciation, critiqued cultural hierarchies and moralistic approaches, and explored the symbolic processes by which individuals and groups communicate.

A compelling history of nineteenth-century economic, social, and cultural life, Capitalism by Gaslight explores the blurred boundary between legitimate and illegitimate economic activity, describing the dealings of prostitutes, dealers in dirty books and used goods, mock auctioneers, illegal slavers, and other entrepreneurs.

Based on new findings, the report overturns current constructions of the origins of the archaeological culture in Hasanlu, showing instead that the Monochrome Burnished Ware Horizon developed gradually from indigenous traditions. This reappraisal has important implications for our understanding of Indo-Iranian migrations into the Zagros region.

This volume considers an array of power-sharing systems in divided cities and states, with critical evaluations of their merits and defects as well as explanations of their emergence, maintenance, and failings.

Daphne Lamothe explores how many black writers and intellectuals in the early twentieth century adapted ethnography and folklore in their narratives to create a cohesive, collective, and modern Black identity.