Books of Love

Food Is LoveLove takes many forms in Penn Press books, from the courtly to the commercial. This love note may not be the most romantic thing you'll read on Valentine's Day, but as with most holiday gifts, it's the thought that counts.

Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility
C. Stephen Jaeger

Public avowals of love between men were common from antiquity through the Middle Ages. What do these expressions leave to interpretation? An extraordinary amount, as Stephen Jaeger demonstrates.

Brotherly Love
Daniel Hoffman

Brotherly Love is a long poem that evokes William Penn's luminous vision of America and shows what has become of it as the intractable conflicts of our history–struggles over the land, keeping faith with the Indians, the uses and abuses of power–threaten Penn's ideal.

Love and Honor in the Himalayas: Coming To Know Another Culture
Ernestine McHugh

Love and Honor in the Himalayas is McHugh's gripping ethnographic memoir based on research among the Gurungs conducted over a span of fourteen years. As she chronicles the events of her fieldwork, she also tells a story that admits feeling and involvement, writing of the people who housed her in the terms in which they cast their relationship with her, that of family.

Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture
E. Jane Burns

In Courtly Love Undressed, E. Jane Burns unfolds the rich display of costly garments worn by amorous partners in literary texts and other cultural documents in the French High Middle Ages.

Food Is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America
Katherine J. Parkin

Parkin examines how advertisers have historically promoted food in distinctly gendered terms, returning repeatedly to themes that associated shopping and cooking with women. Foremost among them was that, regardless of the actual work involved, women should serve food to demonstrate love for their families.

Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America
Helen Sheumaker

Using a wide array of evidence drawn from poetry, fiction, diaries, letters, and examples of hairwork, Love Entwined traces the widespread popularity of the craft from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Victorian men and women treasured hairwork not only as remembrances of loved ones and memorials of relationships but also as objects of beauty and means of personal expression.

On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea
Sealing Cheng

Following the lives of a group of migrant Filipinas who worked as entertainers in South Korea and then journeyed to other parts of Asia, Europe, and the U.S., this ethnography provides a look at how work, sex, love, and ambition in migrants' lives intersect with larger issues of transnationalism, identity, and global hierarchies of inequality.