Discussant: Garrett Sullivan, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English

Phileto's Story (c. 1520) 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. As he travels around the Mediterranean in search of safety, 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 Phileto eschew inept romanticism (unlike young Romeo in Shakespeare's play) and adopt a pragmatic Machiavellian approach to bring about his desired ends.

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). In addition to Phileto’s Story (Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies “Texts in Translation,” 2024), she has edited and translated 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).