This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

First published in 1987, this is a critical edition of the 1647 text by the Scottish author Alexander Ross which offered the Renaissance reader not only a wealth of factual information concerning the gods, goddesses, heroes and monsters of ancient myth and legend, but also served as a treasury of interpretation and commentary ingeniously explaining the facts in terms moral, theological, historical and scientific.

This project has several distinctive features. The first is statistical analysis of publishing records for all British novels (Minerva and otherwise) published between 1780 and 1829 (data are compiled from James Raven’s and Peter Garside’s The English Novel, 1770-1829: a Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles). This analysis confirms that Minerva novelists are more prolific than most female novelists in the period. It is rarely noted that Minerva novelists also often publish on occasion with other presses, something to which the data calls attention. The book’s scope and content challenges an anachronism that still permeates studies of the Romantic era. Minerva’s Gothics restores a forgotten pathway between first-generation Romantic reactions to popular print culture and Percy Shelley’s influential conceptualization of the poet.

This set reprints many of the 18th century's most notorious works, including eight from "The Fifteen Plagues of a Maiden-Head" (1707), that resulted in highly publicized court battles and in some cases helped shape laws on censorship that survived into modernity.