With fall weather slowly creeping in and the school year starting up, it's the perfect time to check out Penn Press's new releases in fields like literature, American history, legal studies, religious studies, human rights, political theory, and more! Take a look at our latest titles below.
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FEATURED TITLES
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"Jason Scott-Warren presents us with a compelling portrait not just of one man but of a key moment in England's literary past. Through a gradual accumulation of evidence, he creates a picture of early modern book culture that is richer, stranger, and more important than the possibility of pinning down who read Shakespeare first, or even how Shakespeare was received. A superb read, packed with gems."—Helen Smith, University of York Richard Stonley, the earliest known purchaser of Shakespeare's first publication, Venus and Adonis, has hitherto been the merest of footnotes in literary history. Through a combination of book history and biography, Shakespeare's First Reader tells a compelling story of how one early modern gentleman lived in and through his library. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 344 pages | 6 x 9 | 43 illus. |
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"Mark Joseph Stern weaves a gripping account of a hugely important Supreme Court term. Stern's deft analysis, combined with the additional context he provides to all of the cases, tell us much about the court that has emerged since Brett Kavanaugh's polarizing confirmation hearings. American Justice 2019 informs readers about the future direction of the court, the kinds of cases that might lead the Chief Justice to break from his fellow conservatives, and other emerging fissures among the Justices. It's an illuminating book."—Leah Litman, University of Michigan Law School In American Justice 2019, Mark Joseph Stern examines the term's most controversial opinions and highlights the consequences of Chief Justice John Roberts stepping into a new role as the court's swing vote. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 184 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 |
AMERICAN HISTORY
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"Unfaithful engagingly focuses on a set of progressives bent on delegitimizing loveless marriages at a time when lifelong indissoluble marriage was the deep-rooted norm. Carol Faulkner unearths a wealth of new detail about the personal lives of individuals struggling to recast patriarchy in intimate life and to promote new values of choice, love, and women's autonomy in the sexual realm."—Patricia Cline Cohen, University of California, Santa Barbara Unfaithful places a distinctive view of adultery at the center of efforts to reform marriage in the nineteenth-century United States, connecting communitarians, free lovers, feminists, spiritualists, bohemians, and abolitionists who all challenged the restrictive legal institution of marriage. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 224 pages | 6 x 9 | 20 illus. |
LITERATURE AND CULTURE
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"Pamela L. Cheek makes an extraordinarily important contribution not just to our understanding of women's writing but also to our thinking about the international circulation and reception of literary texts. Few scholars have anything like Cheek's range, and her ability to speak of the importance of translation without converting it into an easy alignment of one national dictionary with another marks her book with a combination of availability and precision. Heroines and Local Girls is indispensable reading for anyone interested in women's writing and how literature crosses national boundaries."—Frances Ferguson, University of Chicago In Heroines and Local Girls, Pamela L. Cheek explores the rise of women's writing as a distinct, transnational category in Britain and Europe over the long eighteenth century, characterized by stories about heroines who transcend their gendered destiny. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 280 pages | 6 x 9 | 6 illus. |
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"Smart and persuasive, The Prosthetic Tongue presents an authoritative contribution to our understanding of the relationship between the printing revolution and the emergence of national languages in the Renaissance. Its detailed and theoretically informed analysis deserves to be closely read, and its arguments engaged with seriously, by historians and literary scholars who deal with print and linguistics in this period."—Adrian Johns, University of Chicago In The Prosthetic Tongue, Katie Chenoweth explores the relationship between printing and vernacular language as it took shape in sixteenth-century France and charts the technological reinvention of French across a range of domains, from typography, orthography, and grammar to politics, pedagogy, and poetics. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 360 pages | 6 x 9 | 27 illus. |
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"Attending to the full premodern meaning of virtue as well as to recent feminist philosophy, Holly A. Crocker offers an essential new account of ethical life legible in English texts written during the period of transition from late medieval to early modern. The Matter of Virtue is a timely intervention in the history of literary reading that helps us rethink the gendered ecologies of ethics and virtue."—Patricia Clare Ingham, University of Indiana, Bloomington In The Matter of Virtue, Holly A. Crocker explores what happened to virtue when late medieval and early modern English poets thought about the material body not as a tool of an empowered male agent but rather, and as women more frequently experienced it, as something fragile and open, subject but also connected to others. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 360 pages | 6 x 9 | 11 illus. |
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"Looking beyond the canonical Renaissance and its texts, Ivan Lupić offers readers a rich and subtle understanding of the nature of counsel in the period, as both a political and a cultural experience. Subjects of Advice is a valuable and welcome addition to the field of early modern studies."—Greg Walker, University of Edinburgh In Subjects of Advice, Ivan Lupić considers a variety of Renaissance dramatic texts, from the canonical plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare to the anonymous moral interludes and learned humanist drama, in an effort to uncover and define the formative dialogue between dramatic art and the culture of counsel in the early modern period. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 304 pages | 6 x 9 | 1 illus. |
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"A provocative and illuminating volume. Its breadth of topics and approaches adds to its utility and appeal not only for literary scholars but also for historians. It will be the standard reference on historical periodization for years to come."—Zachary S. Schiffman, Northeastern Illinois University Early Modern Histories of Time examines how chronological modes intrinsic to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shaped the thought-worlds of those living during this time and the ways in which these temporally indigenous models can productively influence our own working concepts of historical period. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 376 pages | 6 x 9 |
MEDIEVAL STUDIES
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"Highly original, Bonds of Secrecy reveals something that has been hidden in plain sight throughout a wide variety of texts and makes a significant impact on our understanding of historical and narrative motivations. Benjamin A. Saltzman succeeds in clearing away presentist mental furniture to reveal what secrecy meant to Anglo-Saxons who understood it to be inseparable from divine omniscience."—Leslie Lockett, The Ohio State University Bonds of Secrecy illuminates the relationship between human experiences of secrecy and early medieval beliefs about divine omniscience. Benjamin A. Saltzman argues that this relationship was fundamental to early English legal and monastic culture and profoundly shaped the practices of literary interpretation in the Middle Ages. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 360 pages | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 | 12 |
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
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"Editors Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess are ideally suited to producing this outstanding collection on such a wide-ranging thinker as Judith Shklar. The essays, authored by an impressive roster of scholars, reflect Shklar's capacious range, spanning political and legal theory, history, and international relations."—William Outhwaite, Newcastle University The essays collected in Between Utopia and Realism reflect on and refract Judith N. Shklar's major preoccupations throughout a lifetime of thinking and demonstrate the ways in which her work illuminates contemporary debates across political theory, international relations, and law. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 304 pages | 6 x 9 | 1 illus. |
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"Jamie Mayerfeld's The Promise of Human Rights is a timely corrective to persistent misconceptions about international human rights law's relationship to United States sovereignty and democracy. At a moment when 'American Exceptionalism' has re-emerged, in a new and crasser form, as a normative challenge to compliance with international legal constraints, Mayerfeld reminds us of American democracy's roots in a Madisonian tradition that emphasizes the complex challenges of self-government and the need for checks on the concentration of power. Mayerfeld correctly notes that national sovereignty, far from precluding international legal obligations, is precisely what is exercised in the undertaking of such obligations."—Human Rights Review Jamie Mayerfeld defends international human rights law as an extension of domestic checks and balances and therefore necessary to constitutional government. The book combines theoretical reflections on democracy and constitutionalism with a case study of the contrasting human rights policies of Europe and the United States. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 320 pages | 6 x 9 |
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"In a book that ranges from poignantly personal to deeply ethnographic but is across-the-board strikingly original, Mibenge challenges the legalization of gender essentialism and the gender nature of (sexual violence in) conflict. Using original research from Rwanda and Sierra Leone alongside in-depth legal analysis, the author compellingly makes the argument that the very norms and laws that appear to protect victims of sexual violence actually regulate and silence the very people they are meant to attract."—Choice Chiseche Salome Mibenge applies stringent analysis to the humanitarian but flawed legal narratives of sexual violence in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, calling for more nuanced analysis of how gender shapes violence and access to justice for survivors. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 248 pages | 6 x 9 |
RELIGIOUS STUDIES
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"An erudite and groundbreaking work that advances a new reading of Mark's Gospel at a time when attention to the study of trauma is making an impact on biblical scholarship, The Godman and the Sea is a book that not only New Testament scholars but also theologians and philosophers more generally will turn to as a watershed study."—Harry Maier, Vancouver School of Theology Drawing on trauma theory, philosophical and literary themes in the western cultural canon, and historical context, Michael J. Thate presents a reading of the Gospel of Mark as an exemplary text that responds to and makes meaning of the trauma arising from the crucified and missing body of Jesus. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 328 pages | 6 x 9 |
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
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The two volumes of the central Tikal ceramic reports present the information gathered from the analysis of all ceramics recovered by the University of Pennsylvania research project at Tikal between 1956 and 1970. This volume, Tikal Report 25B, presents the Tikal sequence of nine ceramic complexes (the analysis of the small sample of Postclassic Caban ceramics was not completed), describes the ceramics from each complex, presents the data for all counted lots, and illustrates the material from sherd collections. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 560 pages | 8 1/2 x 11 | 57 illus. |
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