Sherry Roush
147 Burrowes, 230 Old Coaly Way, University Park, PA, 16802
Education:
Biography:
Liberal Arts Professor of Italian specializing in medieval/renaissance and early modern Italian literature and culture, Sherry Roush is the author of Speaking Spirits: Ventriloquizing the Dead in Renaissance Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and Hermes’ Lyre: Italian Poetic Self-Commentary from Dante to Tommaso Campanella (University of Toronto Press, 2002). She has edited and produced the pioneering translations into English of Lodovico Corfino: Phileto’s Story (Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies “Texts in Translation,” 2024) and Jacopo Caviceo’s Peregrino (University of Toronto Press, 2023), which was awarded a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts grant in Literary Translation and a 2020 National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Research fellowship. She also translated and edited the Selected Philosophical Poems of Tommaso Campanella in two volumes (The University of Chicago Press and Fabrizio Serra Editore, both 2011) and co-edited (with Cristelle Baskins) The Medieval Marriage Scene: Prudence, Passion, Policy (Arizona State University Press, 2005).
Her scholarly articles have appeared in journals including: Renaissance Quarterly, Italica, MLN: Modern Language Notes, Quaderni d’Italianistica, Viator, and Italian Culture. Particular areas of scholarly interest encompass the commentary and self-commentary tradition, philosophical poetry, the emergence of the novel, hermeneutics, and the theory and practice of literary translation.
Dr. Roush is a proud 2017 Middlebury Bread Loafer and has received various grants and awards for her research, including prizes from the Bogliasco Foundation, the Folger Institute, and the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. She has received two awards for outstanding teaching and was named a Commencement Marshal for the College of the Liberal Arts. She has served as an elected member of the Modern Language Association’s Executive Committee for Translation Studies and for the Division of Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature. She also serves on the MLA committee to select the Lois Roth and Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for the Translation of a Literary Work and the various book prize categories of the American Association of Teachers of Italian.
Teaching
At Penn State, Dr. Roush shares her research through an array of courses, including graduate-level seminars on “The Fundamentals of Reading Italian for Graduate Research” and “Chaucer and Boccaccio” (co-taught with Robert R. Edwards in English), internships and independent studies for both graduate and undergraduate Italian majors, as well as undergraduate courses including:
- “Ghosts and Otherworldly Visions in Italy: 1300-1600”
- “Great Books in Early Italian Literature,” writing intensive, in Italian
- “Popular Culture in Renaissance Italian Literature,” in Italian
- “From Leonardo da Vinci to Vespucci to Gucci: Impact of Italian Genius,” a first-year seminar in the College of the Liberal Arts, in English
- “Italy’s Inspiration for Your Life,” in Italian
- “Introduction to Italy’s Genius,” in Italian
- “The Theory and Practice of Translation,” in Italian
- “Renaissance Theories of Love: Erotic, Fraternal, and Mystical,” in Italian
- “Modern Italian Literature and Cinema”
- “Dante,” in Italian
- “Dante in Translation”
- “Italian Culture and Civilization,” general education survey in English
- “Masterpieces in Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature,” in Italian
- “Advancing Conversation,” in Italian
- “Intermediate Italian”
Publications
Phileto’s Story
- Author(s): Lodovico Corfino
- Editor(s): Sherry Roush (and Translator)
- Publication Date: 2024
- Website: https://pubs.crrs.ca/products/tt19
Phileto’s Story is a love tale that starts in Renaissance Verona and then moves across the entire Mediterranean basin. It describes a young man’s fascination with the beautiful Euphrosyne, his forceful seduction of her, how his lust soon turns to love, and how that love leads to conflict, death, and banishment. During his travels, Phileto faces the dangers of shipwreck, negotiates with other cultures, survives the perils of dangerous missions, benefits from the strength of friendships, suffers the pain of homesickness, and copes with the tragic suicide of a female friend before he can finally return to Verona and reunite with his beloved Euphrosyne. In this coming-of-age story, we see how Phileto takes a markedly pragmatic, almost Machiavellian approach to achieve his amorous ends. The book also contains annotations and a glossary.
Jacopo Caviceo’s Peregrino: Annotated English Edition and Translation
- Author(s): Jacopo Caviceo
- Editor(s): Sherry Roush (and Translator)
- Publication Date: 2023
- Website: https://utorontopress.com/9781487532611/jacopo-caviceos-peregrino/
Jacopo Caviceo’s Peregrino (1508) was a bestselling Renaissance prose romance in Italy, France, and Spain. Perhaps the first novel written for women, it relates the courtship of two young lovers from hostile households who succeed in doing what Romeo and Juliet, among others, could not: reconcile their families and marry without resorting to suicide. The work features cameos of historical celebrities who interact with fictitious characters during many adventures, which include a Mediterranean pilgrimage, courtly celebrations, funerals, legal trials, and a journey to the Other World. The book presents female agency in psychologically developed characters and contexts and includes allusions to previous literary masterpieces, including Homer’s epics, Vergil’s Aeneid, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. This edition includes a detailed introduction and a biography of Jacopo Caviceo. Drawing on critical and comparative studies in a broad range of literary interests, the book sheds light on the emergence of the modern novel in the early modern period.
Speaking Spirits: Ventriloquizing the Dead in Renaissance Italy
- Author(s): Sherry Roush
- Publication Date: 2015 (re-issued in paperback in 2022)
- Website: https://utorontopress.com/9781487547585/speaking-spirits/
In classical and early modern rhetoric, to write or speak using the voice of a dead individual is known as eidolopoeia. Whether through ghost stories, journeys to another world, or dream visions, Renaissance writers frequently used this rhetorical device not only to co-opt the authority of their predecessors but also to express partisan or politically dangerous arguments. In Speaking Spirits, Sherry Roush presents the first systematic study of early modern Italian eidolopoeia. Expanding the study beyond the well-known cases of the shades in Dante’s Divina commedia and the spirits of Boccaccio’s De casibus vivorum illustrium, Roush examines many other appearances of famous ghosts – invocations of Boccaccio by Vincenzo Bagli and Jacopo Caviceo, Girolamo Malipiero’s representation of Petrarch in Limbo, and Girolamo Benivieni’s ghostly voice of Pico della Mirandola. Through close readings of these eidolopoetic texts, she illuminates the important role that this rhetoric played in the literary, legal, and political history of Renaissance Italy.
Selected Philosophical Poems of Tommaso Campanella. Vol. 2
- Author(s): Tommaso Campanella
- Editor(s): Sherry Roush (and Translator)
This second volume completes Tommaso Campanella’s unabridged Scelta di poesie filosofiche in a facing-page English translation with critical annotations and the poet’s self-commentary.
Selected Philosophical Poems of Tommaso Campanella: A Bilingual Edition
- Author(s): Tommaso Campanella
- Editor(s): Sherry Roush (and Translator)
- Publication Date: 2011
- Website: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo10714670.html
A contemporary of Giordano Bruno and Galileo, Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) was a controversial philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet who was persecuted during the Inquisition and spent much of his adult life imprisoned because of his heterodox views. He is best known today for two works: The City of the Sun, a dialogue inspired by Plato’s Republic, in which he prophesies a vision of a unified, peaceful world governed by a theocratic monarchy; and his well-meaning Defense of Galileo, which may have done Galileo more harm than good because of Campanella’s imprisonment. But Campanella’s philosophical poems are where his most forceful and undiluted ideas reside. His poetry is where his faith in observable and experimental sciences, his astrological and occult wisdom, his ideas about deism, his anti-Aristotelianism, and his calls for religious and secular reform most put him at odds with both civil and church authorities. For this volume, Sherry Roush has selected Campanella’s best and most idiosyncratic poems, which are masterpieces of sixteenth-century Italian lyrics, displaying his questing mind and showing Campanella’s passionate belief in the intrinsic harmony between the sacred and secular.
The Medieval Marriage Scene: Prudence, Passion, Policy
- Editor(s): Sherry Roush and Cristelle L. Baskins
- Publication Date: 2005
In this collection of essays, twelve scholars share their expertise in medieval marriage and the family, through the disciplinary perspectives in literature, history, art history, law, religious studies, and economics, and across cultural and geographical contexts from London to Valencia to the Levant.
Hermes’ Lyre: Italian Poetic Self-Commentary from Dante to Tommaso Campanella
- Author(s): Sherry Roush
- Publication Date: 2002
- Website: https://utorontopress.com/9780802037121/hermes-lyre/
From the mysterious glosses by ‘EK’ in the poetry of Edmund Spenser, to the self-commentary in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, readers of literature have been fascinated by the comments, addenda, and footnotes added by authors to their own work. In this study, Sherry Roush investigates poets’ motivations for writing glosses and prosimetra. She argues that self-commentary differs fundamentally from standard commentary, in that it does not necessarily impose an authoritative reading, determine the poem’s significance, or furnish factual autobiographical information. Rather, self-commentary presents an intriguing ulterior poetic dimension and adds to the inherent tension of the text. Roush focuses her study on three pairs of authors, each representing a distinct historical-contextual period: Dante and Boccaccio in the early Italian self-commentative tradition, Lorenzo de’ Medici and Girolamo Benivieni in high Renaissance Florence, and Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella at the turn of the seventeenth century. Through numerous examples, Roush highlights the non-linear development of this mixed genre, and shows how poetic self-commentaries respond to unique literary, historical, and political exigencies, and offer keys to understanding the underlying poetic messages.