Penn Press Log

Books Without Borders--Now Available

Books Without Borders in Enlightenment Europe: French Cosmopolitanism and German Literary Markets
Jeffrey Freedman
384 pages | 6 x 9 | 21 illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4389-5 | $79.95 | £52.00
A volume in the Material Texts series

This book examines one of the most important axes of the book trade in Enlightenment Europe: the circulation of French books between France and German-speaking Europe. The first detailed study of the Franco-German trade, it shows how book dealers mediated the transmission of literature across the frontiers of nation, language, and culture. Read more . . .

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

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.

Literacy in the Persianate World--Now Available

Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order
Edited by Brian Spooner and William L. Hanaway
456 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-1-934536-45-2 | $59.95 | £39.00
A volume in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology series

Persian has been a written language since the sixth century B.C. Only Chinese, Greek, and Latin have comparable histories of literacy. Although Persian script changed—first from cuneiform to a modified Aramaic, then to Arabic—from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries it served a broader geographical area than any language in world history.

Literacy in the Persianate World offers the first comparative study of the historical role of writing in three languages including two in non-Roman scripts, over a period of two and a half millennia, providing an opportunity for reassessment of the work on literacy in English that has accumulated over the past half century. Read more . . .

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

John Woolman's Path to the Peaceable Kingdom--Now Available

John Woolman's Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire
Geoffrey Plank
320 pages | 6 x 9 | 15 illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4405-2 | $39.95 | £26.00
A volume in the Early American Studies series

Drawing on the diaries of contemporaries, personal correspondence, the minutes of Quaker meetings, business and probate records, pamphlets, and other sources, this book shows that Woolman and his neighbors were far more engaged with the problems of inequality, trade, and warfare than previously understood. Read more . . .

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

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

Astounding Wonder--Now Available

Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America
John Cheng
384 pages | 6 x 9 | 20 Illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4383-3 | $45.00 | £29.50

"John Cheng's highly readable book imaginatively shows the science fiction community's role in, and ways of, perceiving science. Cheng displays the ways in which readers incorporated science fiction into their lives, how this led them to think about science, and further still how some of them imagined aspects of that science into being. Displaying sure-handed use of challenging sources as well as deep knowledge of scientific as well as social theory, Astounding Wonder is cultural history at its best, and so much more."--Ian Gordon, author of Comic Strips and Consumer Culture

Read more . . .

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

Religion in Republic Rome--Now Available

Religion in Republican Rome: Rationalization and Ritual Change
Jörg Rüpke
336 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4394-9 | $69.95 | £45.50
A volume in the Empire and After series

Jörg Rüpke analyzes ritual and intellectual change in the city of Rome from the third to the first centuries B.C.E. The development of rational argument about religion and antiquarian systematization of religious practices is contextualized with respect to Roman expansion and the cultural exchange between Greece and Rome. 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.

How Governors Built the Modern American Presidency--Now Available

How Governors Built the Modern American Presidency
Saladin M. Ambar
184 pages | 6 x 9 | 2 illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4396-3 | $55.00 | £36.00
A volume in the Haney Foundation Series

Saladin M. Ambar's innovative study is the first book to explicitly credit governors with making the presidency what it is today. This book explodes the idea that the modern presidency began after 1945, instead placing its origins squarely in the Progressive Era. Read more . . .

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

Christ Circumcised--Now Available

Christ Circumcised: A Study in Early Christian History and Difference
Andrew S. Jacobs
320 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4397-0 | $75.00 | £49.00
A volume in the Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion series

This first full-length study of Jesus' circumcision reimagines the language of difference and identity in early Christianity. From his earliest appearance in the Gospel of Luke to the medieval Feast of the Circumcision, Christ circumcised embodies a new way of imagining Christians and their creation of a new religious culture. Read more . . .

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