University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks

Beyond her most famous creation—the nightmarish vision of Frankenstein’s Creature—Mary Shelley’s most enduring influence on politics, literature, and art perhaps stems from the legacy of her lesser-known novel about the near-extinction of the human species through war, disease, and corruption. This novel, The Last Man (1826), gives us the iconic image of a heroic survivor who narrates the history…

Between the Bridge and the Barricade explores how translations of non-Jewish texts into Jewish languages impacted Jewish culture, literature, and history from the sixteenth century into modern times. Offering a comprehensive view of early modern Jewish translation, Iris Idelson-Shein charts major paths of textual migration from non-Jewish to Jewish literatures, analyzes translators’ motives, and …

Nine years lie between the original German publication of my book Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung, which appeared in 2014 under the auspices of Suhrkamp's Jüdischer Verlag (Jewish Press), and Zimzum: God and the Origin of the World.The original edition of the book was widely received and reviewed.In it, I pre sent the more than four-hundred-year, rather paradoxical history of the originally esoteri…

In Cosmos, Liturgy, and the Arts in the Twelfth Century , Margot E. Fassler takes readers into the rich, complex world of Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias (meaning “Know the ways”) to explore how medieval thinkers understood and imagined the universe. Hildegard, renowned for her contributions to theology, music, literature, and art, developed unique methods for integrating these forms of thought and…

For over seven hundred years, bodies of writing in vernacular languages served an indispensable role in the religious and intellectual culture of medieval Christian England, yet the character and extent of their importance have been insufficiently recognized. A longstanding identification of medieval western European Christianity with the Latin language and a lack of awareness about the sheer var…

Tekla Bude starts from a simple premise—that music requires a body to perform it—to rethink the relationship between music, matter, and the body in the late medieval period. Sonic Bodies argues that writers thought of "music" and "the body" as mutually dependent and historically determined processes that called each other into being.

Glenn D. Burger argues that, over the course of the long fourteenth century, the "invention" of the good wife in discourses of sacramental marriage, private devotion, and personal conduct reconfigures how female embodiment is understood.