Böcker utgivna av University of Pennsylvania Press

By examining periodization together with the two controversial categories of feudalism and secularization, Kathleen Davis exposes the relationship between the constitution of "the Middle Ages" and the history of sovereignty, slavery, and colonialism.

Americans are generally apprehensive about what they perceive as big government—especially when it comes to measures that target their bodies. Soda taxes, trans fat bans, and calorie counts on menus have all proven deeply controversial. Such interventions, Rachel Louise Moran argues, are merely the latest in a long, albeit often quiet, history of policy motivated by economic, military, and familial concerns. In Governing Bodies, Moran traces the tension between the intimate terrain of the individual citizen''s body and the public ways in which the federal government has sought to shape the American physique over the course of the twentieth century.Distinguishing her subject from more explicit and aggressive government intrusion into the areas of sexuality and reproduction, Moran offers the concept of the "advisory state"—the use of government research, publicity, and advocacy aimed at achieving citizen support and voluntary participation to realize social goals. Instituted through outside agencies and glossy pamphlets as well as legislation, the advisory state is government out of sight yet intimately present in the lives of citizens. The activities of such groups as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Children''s Bureau, the President''s Council on Physical Fitness, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) implement federal body projects in subtle ways that serve to mask governmental interference in personal decisions about diet and exercise. From advice-giving to height-weight standards to mandatory nutrition education, these tactics not only empower and conceal the advisory state but also maintain the illusion of public and private boundaries, even as they become blurred in practice.Weaving together histories of the body, public policy, and social welfare, Moran analyzes a series of discrete episodes to chronicle the federal government''s efforts to shape the physique of its citizenry. Governing Bodies sheds light on our present anxieties over the proper boundaries of state power.

The AIDS crisis of the 1980s looms large in recent histories of sexuality, medicine, and politics, and justly so—an unknown virus without a cure ravages an already persecuted minority, medical professionals are unprepared and sometimes unwilling to care for the sick, and a national health bureaucracy is slow to invest resources in finding a cure. Yet this widely accepted narrative, while accurate, creates the impression that the gay community lacked any capacity to address AIDS. In fact, as Katie Batza demonstrates in this path-breaking book, there was already a well-developed network of gay-health clinics in American cities when the epidemic struck, and these clinics served as the first responders to the disease. Before AIDS explores this heretofore unrecognized story, chronicling the development of a national gay health network by highlighting the origins of longstanding gay health institutions in Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles, placing them in a larger political context, and following them into the first five years of the AIDS crisis.Like many other minority communities in the 1970s, gay men faced public health challenges that resulted as much from their political marginalization and social stigmatization as from any disease. Gay men mistrusted mainstream health institutions, fearing outing, ostracism, misdiagnosis, and the possibility that their sexuality itself would be treated as a medical condition. In response to these problems, a colorful cast of doctors and activists built a largely self-sufficient gay medical system that challenged, collaborated with, and educated mainstream health practitioners. Taking inspiration from rhetoric employed by the Black Panther, feminist, and anti-urban renewal movements, and putting government funding to new and often unintended uses, gay health activists of the 1970s changed the medical and political understandings of sexuality and health to reflect the new realities of their own sexual revolution.

An anonymous book appeared in Venice in 1547 titled L''Alcorano di Macometto, and, according to the title page, it contained "the doctrine, life, customs, and laws [of Mohammed] . . . newly translated from Arabic into the Italian language." Were this true, L''Alcorano di Macometto would have been the first printed direct translation of the Qur''an in a European vernacular language. The truth, however, was otherwise. As soon became clear, the Qur''anic sections of the book—about half the volume—were in fact translations of a twelfth-century Latin translation that had appeared in print in Basel in 1543. The other half included commentary that balanced anti-Islamic rhetoric with new interpretations of Muhammad''s life and political role in pre-Islamic Arabia. Despite having been discredited almost immediately, the Alcorano was affordable, accessible, and widely distributed.In The Venetian Qur''an, Pier Mattia Tommasino uncovers the volume''s mysterious origins, its previously unidentified author, and its broad, lasting influence. L''Alcorano di Macometto, Tommasino argues, served a dual purpose: it was a book for European refugees looking to relocate in the Ottoman Empire, as well as a general Renaissance reader''s guide to Islamic history and stories. The book''s translation and commentary were prepared by an unknown young scholar, Giovanni Battista Castrodardo, a complex and intellectually accomplished man, whose commentary in L''Alcorano di Macometto bridges Muhammad''s biography and the text of the Qur''an with Machiavelli''s The Prince and Dante''s Divine Comedy. In the years following the publication of L''Alcorano di Macometto, the book was dismissed by Arabists and banned by the Catholic Church. It was also, however, translated into German, Hebrew, and Spanish and read by an extended lineage of missionaries, rabbis, renegades, and iconoclasts, including such figures as the miller Menocchio, Joseph Justus Scaliger, and Montesquieu. Through meticulous research and literary analysis, The Venetian Qur''an reveals the history and legacy of a fascinating historical and scholarly document.

How did descriptions of individuals' appearance reinforce emergent categories of race? In Colonial Complexions, more than 4000 advertisements for runaway slaves and servants reveal how colonists transformed seemingly observable characteristics into racist reality.

The ruthless military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983 betrayed the country''s people, presiding over massive disappearances of its citizenry and, in the process, destroying the state''s trustworthiness as the guardian of safety and well-being. Desperate relatives risked their lives to find the disappeared, and one group of mothers defied the repressive regime with weekly protests at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. How do societies cope with human losses and sociocultural traumas in the aftermath of such instances of political violence and state terror?In Argentina Betrayed, Antonius C. G. M. Robben demonstrates that the dynamics of trust and betrayal that convulsed Argentina during the dictatorship did not end when democracy returned but rather persisted in confrontations over issues such as the truth about the disappearances, the commemoration of the past, and the guilt and accountability of perpetrators. Successive governments failed to resolve these debates because of erratic policies made under pressure from both military and human rights groups. Mutual mistrust between the state, retired officers, former insurgents, and bereaved relatives has been fueled by recurrent revelations and controversies that prevent Argentine society from conclusively coming to terms with its traumatic past.With thirty years of scholarly engagement with Argentina—and drawing on his extensive, fair-minded interviews with principals at all points along the political spectrum—Robben explores how these ongoing dynamics have influenced the complicated mourning over violent deaths and disappearances. His analysis deploys key concepts from the contemporary literature of human rights, transitional justice, peace and reconciliation, and memory studies, including notions of trauma, denial, accountability, and mourning. The resulting volume is an indispensable contribution to a better understanding of the terrible crimes committed by the Argentine dictatorship in the 1970s and their aftermath.

Recent reports on Pentecostalism in the global South give the impression of an inexorable trajectory of massive growth, but Faith in Flux examines the religion's ambivalent reception in northern Mozambique, locating vital insight in the overlooked places where this religion has failed to take root.

The scribes of early medieval England wrote out their vernacular poems using a format that looks primitive to our eyes because it lacks the familiar visual cues of verse lineation, marks of punctuation, and capital letters. The paradox is that scribes had those tools at their disposal, which they deployed in other kinds of writing, but when it came to their vernacular poems they turned to a sparser presentation. How could they afford to be so indifferent? The answer lies in the expertise that Anglo-Saxon readers brought to the task. From a lifelong immersion in a tradition of oral poetics they acquired a sophisticated yet intuitive understanding of verse conventions, such that when their eyes scanned the lines written out margin-to-margin, they could pinpoint with ease such features as alliteration, metrical units, and clause boundaries, because those features are interwoven in the poetic text itself. Such holistic reading practices find a surprising source of support in present-day eye-movement studies, which track the complex choreography between eye and brain and show, for example, how the minimal punctuation in manuscripts snaps into focus when viewed as part of a comprehensive system.How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems uncovers a sophisticated collaboration between scribes and the earliest readers of poems like Beowulf, The Wanderer, and The Dream of the Rood. In addressing a basic question that no previous study has adequately answered, it pursues an ambitious synthesis of a number of fields usually kept separate: oral theory, paleography, syntax, and prosody. To these philological topics Daniel Donoghue adds insights from the growing field of cognitive psychology. According to Donoghue, the earliest readers of Old English poems deployed a unique set of skills that enabled them to navigate a daunting task with apparent ease. For them reading was both a matter of technical proficiency and a social practice.

Susan Juster explores different forms of sacred violence-blood sacrifice, holy war, malediction, and iconoclasm-to uncover how European traditions of ritual violence developed during the Reformation were introduced and ultimately transformed in the New World.

Vividly recounting the lives of enslaved women in eighteenth-century Bridgetown, Barbados, and their conditions of confinement through urban, legal, sexual, and representational power wielded by slave owners, authorities, and the archive, Marisa J. Fuentes challenges how histories of vulnerable and invisible subjects are written.

Backroads Pragmatists is the first examination of the influence of Mexican social reform on the United States. Flores illustrates how postrevolutionary Mexico's experiments in government and education shaped American race relations from the New Deal through the destruction of Jim Crow.

Excavations in Residential Areas of Tikal-Nonelite Groups Without Shrines is a two-volume presentation of the excavations carried out in and near small residential structures at Tikal, Guatemala. Tikal Report 20B reviews and interprets the data from 20A to draw new conclusions about settlement, demography, and society at Tikal.

This book argues that the history and archaeology of the site of Gordion in central Turkey have been misunderstood since the beginning of the excavations in the 1950s. It demonstrates that Gordion was not destroyed ca. 700 B.C. by an invasion but rather 100 years earlier, in 800 B.C., by a fire.

This volume covers all aspects of Gordion's Phrygian settlement topography from the arrival of the Phrygians in the tenth century B.C. through the arrival of Alexander the Great in 333 B.C., focusing on the site's changing topography and the consistently fluctuating interaction between the inhabitants and the landscape.

Excavations at Gilund provides a full analysis of the artifacts recovered during the five-year excavation conducted by the University of Pennsylvania and Deccan College. Their findings shed light on the extent and nature of early trade networks, the rise of early complex societies, and the symbolic and ideological beliefs of this region.

Excavations in Residential Areas of Tikal-Nonelite Groups Without Shrines is a two-volume presentation of the excavations carried out in and near small residential structures at Tikal, Guatemala. Tikal Report 20A is a descriptive presentation of the excavation data and includes nearly two hundred illustrations.

This volume describes a series of ongoing research projects from the site of Hasanlu, providing new information on Iron Age technology. Topics covered range from crafts such as textiles, glassmaking, metallurgy, and weapon making, to DNA research on the population history of the area.

Bringing an archaeological eye to an examination of human response to unpredictable environmental conditions, this volume develops a picture of how societies perceive environmental risk, how they alter their behavior in the face of changing conditions, and under what challenges the most rapid and far-reaching changes in adaptation have taken place.

This work is a contribution to both the archaeobotany of west Asia and the archaeology of the site of Gordion in central Anatolia (present-day Turkey). The book's major concern is understanding long-term changes in the environment and in land use.

The city of Istanbul, its history, and institutions during the Ottoman and Republican periods.

Volume 3 presents the supplementary materials that support the settlement history of the Vrokastro region, derived from intensive and systematic survey. The book presents brief summaries of regional pottery of the Bronze Age, Roman, and medieval to modern periods (with tables). Illustrations include maps, plans, pottery profiles, and photographs of sites, features, and pottery. The CD-ROM pottery catalogue is divided into four main units: Neolithic-Geometric, Orientalizing-Hellenistic, Early Roman-Late Roman, and Late Byzantine through Turkish-Modern.Many of the sites have been damaged or destroyed by recent development, and this publication will remain their only record.

The Guatemalan ancient city of Piedras Negras, with its magnificent palaces, temples and other great buildings, was once the capital of a large Maya kingdom, reaching its apogee between c.450 and 810 AD.