Family Name: Sherman
First Name: Rowland
Birth Date: 1662
Birth Place: Leicester
Death Date: Dec, 1747
Death Place: Aleppo
Main places of activity:
Place From To
London 1679 1687
Place From To
Aleppo 1687 1746
Personal info:
Education
While we have no information about the early education Sherman received from his family in Leicester, we know from his later correspondence that he developed an interest and passion for music very early.

From the 1680s, he was with his brother in London, like him apprenticed to the Levant Company merchant Gabriel Roberts.
Career

In July 1688, Sherman sailed for Aleppo, which he chose as his operational base for the rest of his life. He acted as factor and merchant for the Levant Company. In addition, Sherman was a member of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, conducting propaganda and missionary activities for the Anglican church.

Sherman also played the harpischord and engaged with the local musical culture, as his correspondence shows.
Financial Situation

Sherman ended up becoming a wealthy and prominent merchant in the Levant.

translations activities

Besides his knowledge of Italian and Greek, in Aleppo Sherman learned Arabic and Turkish under the guidance of the Maronite priest Pietro de Oliva. He first began translating religious tracts on Islam into English. In the 1720s and 1730s, Sherman was involved in the translation of Psalms and from English into Arabic, to circulate them on the behalf of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge.  In 1727, Sherman promoted the editing and printing of an Arabic version of the New Testament by Sulaimān ibn Yaʿqūb al-Ṣāliḥānī (known as Salomon Negri).

The catalogue of Sherman's private library leads to the assumption that he owned some 73 different works of Greek Orthodox and Anglican Protestant literature that he translated or contributed to translate into Arabic. Among the authors of whom we are certain figures the Metropolitan Bishop of Philadelphia Gabriel Sévèros.

Sherman was undoubtedly a formidable agent of cultural transmission and exchange on many different levels, dealing extensively with religious propaganda against the Catholic missionaries in Syria.


secondary bibliography references

B. White, ''Brothers of the String': Henry Purcell and the Letter-Books of Rowland Sherman', Music & Letters, 92, n° 4 (2011), pp. 519-581.

C. Zwierlein, Imperial Unknowns. The French and British in the Mediterranean, 1650-1750, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 171, 208-209, 229-231.

Id., 'Coexistence and Ignorance: What Europeans in the Levant did not read (ca. 1620-1750)', in C. Zwierlein, ed., The Dark Side of Knowledge. Histories of Ignorance, 1400 to 1800, Leiden, Brill, 2016, pp. 225-264 (250-255).

B. White, 'Music and Merchants in Restoration London', in L. Austern, C. Bailey and A. Winkler, eds., Beyond Boundaries: Rethinking Music Circulation in Early Modern England, Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2017, pp. 150-164 (155-157).

S. Mills, 'Learning Arabic in the Overseas Factories:: The Case of the English', in J. Loop, A. Hamilton and C. Burnett, eds., The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe, Leiden, Brill, 2017, pp. 272-293 (278-279).

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By:

  • Giovanni Lista