Penn Press Log

Shame and Honor--Now Available

Shame and Honor: A Vulgar History of the Order of the Garter
Stephanie Trigg
352 pages | 6 x 9 | 30 illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4391-8 | $55.00 | £36.00

Shame and Honor is a cultural history of the Order of the Garter, a medieval institution that persists into the twenty-first century. It explores the changing meaning of medieval culture and ritual practice, and of shame and honor, for early modern, post-medieval, and contemporary culture. 

"It's a nice piece of pageantry. . . . Rationally it's lunatic, but in practice, everyone enjoys it, I think."--HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh

Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson. 

Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Unmarriages--Now Available

Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages
Ruth Mazo Karras
304 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4420-5 | $49.95 | £32.50
A volume in the Middle Ages Series

Traditional marriage was not the only option for couples in medieval Europe. Alternative forms of union could make lives precarious but also provided a degree of flexibility. The study draws on a wide geographical and chronological range of examples in order to illustrate local difference while bringing out broad patterns. Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson at jorobin@upenn.edu.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne--Now Available

Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne
Sara McDougall
240 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4398-7 | $55.00 | £36.00
A volume in the Middle Ages Series

This book investigates the earliest known prosecutions of bigamy. In fifteenth-century Champagne, ordinary Christians valued marriage enough to risk criminal prosecution for illegal remarriage. Meanwhile, Church officials regarded bigamy as a grave threat to Christian identity and subjected male bigamists to harsh punishment. Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages--Now Available

Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages
Sanping Chen
320 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth Mar 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4370-3 | $79.95 | £52.00
A volume in the Encounters with Asia series

Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages exposes a number of long-hidden "foreign" elements in Chinese culture that represent the legacy of the Tuoba, a former nomadic group originally from central Asia. Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

The Crusades and the Christian World of the East Wins John Nicholas Brown Prize

Congratulations to Christopher MacEvitt, Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College. MacEvitt's The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance received the Medieval Academy of America’s John Nicholas Brown Prize for 2012. The Brown Prize is awarded annually for a first book or monograph on a medieval subject judged by the selection committee to be of outstanding quality. The prize was presented to MacEvitt at this year's annual Medieval Academy meeting in St. Louis, MO.

 

Penn Press Authors Receive National Humanities Medals

Congratulations to Robert Darnton and Teofilo F. Ruiz, Penn Press authors and 2011 National Humanities Medalists. The National Endowment for the Humanities created the National Humanities Medal to honor "individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities, broadened our citizens’ engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans’ access to important resources in the humanities." President Barack Obama presented the awards to Darnton, Ruiz, and other honorees at a White House ceremony yesterday.

Darnton, author of The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon, received a medal for his commitment to making knowledge accessible to everyone. "An eminent cultural historian and librarian, Dr. Darnton has illuminated the world of Enlightenment and Revolutionary France, and has pursued his vision for a national library of digitized books," said the president. 

Teofilo F. Ruiz, author of Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile, received a medal for his outstanding scholarship in history. The president praised Ruiz for "deepening our knowledge of medieval Spain and Europe, and exploring the role terror has played in society for centuries."

After the ceremony, the medalists attended a reception with President Obama and Michelle Obama.

Peasant Scenes and Landscapes--Now in Paperback

Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market
Larry Silver
392 pages | 7 x 10 | 152 illus.
Paper 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2211-1 | $32.50 | £21.50

Winner of the 2007 Roland H. Bainton Prize in Art and Music from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2006

"Encompassing a complex and varied set of methodologies, economic histories of the arts have framed compelling new questions around the activities of artists, patrons, and dealers as cultural agents that tend to locate meaning in behavior rather than visuality. Larry Silver's entrée into the field not only builds on his own earlier explorations but also significantly reorients the kinds of questions asked and, by extension, the nature of the answers derived from the study of markets."--CAA Reviews

Read more . . .

 

 

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.

Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Colonizer or Colonized--Now Available

Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture
Sara E. Melzer
344 pages | 6 x 9 | 9 illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4363-5 | $75.00 | £49.00

This innovative analysis of sixteen- and seventeenth-century France introduces colonization into the heart of the nation's literary history by demonstrating how French classical culture and colonialism emerged together, each shaping the other. Read more . . .

 

 

 

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.

Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Lord's Rights and Peasants Stories--Now Available

Lords' Rights and Peasant Stories: Writing and the Formation of Tradition in the Later Middle Ages
Simon Teuscher. Translated by Philip Grace
320 pages | 6 x 9 | 5 illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4368-0 | $69.95 | £45.50
A volume in the Middle Ages Series

Lords' Rights and Peasant Stories suggests rethinking master narratives about transitions from oral to literate societies, examining how village laws (Weistümer) were written down. Read more . . .

 

 

 

 

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.

Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Paul's Pick of the Month, a Free Article from the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies

Every month, Paul Chase in the Penn Press Journals department invites our blog readers to download a complimentary article from one of our many scholarly journals.

Paul's Pick for January, Defining Early Modern Pornography: The Case of Venus and Adonis by Chantelle Thauvette, appears in the latest issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies.

"In the 2006 third edition of The Oxford English Dictionary, the definition of pornography was revised to include a distinction between the “erotic” and “aesthetic” feelings sexually explicit representations produce in their audiences. While this distinction is not new, its recent inclusion in the definition of pornography invites us to explore sexually explicit early modern literature, such as Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, in a new light," writes Thauvette.

To download this free article and learn more about the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, click here.

Check the Penn Press Log on February 15 for Paul's next pick.