Table Of ContentA Companion to Celestina
The Renaissance Society of America
Texts and Studies Series
Editor-in-Chief
Ingrid De Smet (University of Warwick)
Editorial Board
Anne Coldiron (Florida State University)
Paul Grendler, Emeritus (University of Toronto)
James Hankins (Harvard University)
Craig Kallendorf (Texas a&m University)
Gerhild Scholz-Williams (Washington University in St. Louis)
Lía Schwartz Lerner (cuny Graduate Center)
VOLUME 9
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/rsa
A Companion to Celestina
By
Enrique Fernandez
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: ‘La Celestina’. Oil on canvas. Original painting by Rafael Ramírez Máro (2011, 120 cm × 200
cm). Location: RMI Institut Hauset, Belgium. Website: rafael.ramirezmaro.org. Photography by Jens Schultze.
©Rafael Ramirez Máro.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017021294
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 2212-3091
isbn 978-90-04-34929-2 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-34932-2 (e-book)
Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.
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Contents
Preface ix
List of Illustrations xi
Notes on Contributors xiii
Introduction
1 The Significance of Celestina 3
Joseph T. Snow
Text, Origins and Sources
2 The Early Editions and the Authorship of Celestina 21
José Luis Canet
3 The Poetics of Voice, the Performance, and the Meaning of Celestina 41
Gustavo Illades Aguiar
4 Quotation, Plagiarism, Allusion, and Reminiscence: Intertextuality in
Celestina 58
Amaranta Saguar García
5 Theater Without a Stage: Celestina and the Humanistic Comedy 74
Devid Paolini
6 Celestina in the Context of Fifteenth-Century Castilian Vernacular
Humanism 94
José Luis Gastañaga Ponce de León
7 Minerva’s Dog and Other Problematic Points in Celestina’s Text 108
Fernando Cantalapiedra Erostarbe
8 Calisto and Leriano in Love 124
Ivy A. Corfis
vi Contents
9 The Story of Hero and Leander: A Possible Unknown Source of
Celestina 141
Bienvenido Morros Mestres
Themes and Readings
10 “Aquellos antigos libros”: Approaches to Parody in Celestina 161
Ryan D. Giles
11 Risky Business: The Politics of Prostitution in Celestina 173
Enriqueta Zafra
12 A Guidebook for Two Cities: The Physical and the Political Urban
Space in Celestina 188
Raúl Álvarez-Moreno
13 Magic in Celestina 205
Patrizia Botta
14 Lovesickness and the Problematical Text of Celestina, Act 1 225
Ricardo Castells
15 Jesus and Mary, Christian Prayer, and the Saints in Celestina 242
Manuel da Costa Fontes
16 Eating, Drinking, and Consuming in the Tragicomedia de Calisto y
Melibea 262
Connie L. Scarborough
Influence and Posterity
17 Modernity and Celestina: The Future of Our Past and of Our
Present 275
Antonio Pérez-Romero
18 Celestina as a Precursor to the Picaresque 292
Ted L. L. Bergman
Contents vii
19 Early Responses to Celestina: Translations and Commentary 305
Kathleen V. Kish
20 Celestina’s Continuations, Adaptations, and Influences 321
Consolación Baranda
21 Celestina and Agustín Arrieta’s China Poblana: Mexico’s Female Icon
Revisited 339
Beatriz de Alba-Koch
22 The Images of Celestina and Its Visual Culture 362
Enrique Fernandez
23 Celestina in Film and Television 383
Yolanda Iglesias
Electronic Resources, Editions, and Select Bibliography 403
Index 416
Preface
In spite of the enormous success of Celestina in Spain soon after its publica-
tion, of its immediate translations into the main European languages, and of
its influence in their literatures—it is said to have inspired Romeo and Juliet—
this masterpiece has not made it into the world literature canon, in which Don
Quixote continues to be the only representative of Spanish letters. Celestina’s
exclusion is totally undeserved since its many merits include the pioneering
of the same parodic treatment of other genres that Cervantes so successfully
exploited. And this is only one of the creative paths opened by Celestina that
left a strong imprint on world literature: the treatment of the marginalized
members of society that the Spanish picaresque made into its anti-heroes is
also clearly indebted to Celestina. Compared to the two mythical characters
that Spanish literature has contributed to the world, Don Quixote and Don
Juan, the bawd Celestina is barely known outside the Hispanic countries. It
is difficult to ascertain why Celestina did not maintain the momentum of the
first two centuries after its publication and today is relatively unknown in the
international literary arena. Several factors seem to have conspired in this un-
deserved neglect. Celestina has a strong medieval component, which makes
it a text difficult to follow for readers of later periods, who do not have the
required patience for the erudition and rhetoric in its text. However, its other-
wise entertaining dialogues and general plot are sufficiently “modern” as to be
enthralling, even titillating, especially in the passages of open sexual content.
On the other hand, Celestina has triggered a vast scholarship that continues to
find new, surprising meanings and other features in its text. Although part of
this scholarship was written in English, and some in French and German, the
vast majority is in Spanish, and highly fragmented. Besides a few brief summa-
ries of the main studies—as Peter N. Dunn’s 1975 Fernando de Rojas in Twayne’s
World Authors Series, valuable but by now outdated—or collections of a few
articles on specific subjects, there is not, even in Spanish, a book as compre-
hensive and thorough on Celestina as the one we present here.
This Companion to Celestina brings together twenty-three hitherto unpub-
lished texts on the main aspects of Celestina, written by some of the leading
experts in specific areas of its scholarship. The contributors were asked to sum-
marize and evaluate the previous studies and then expand on them with their
own research and opinions in mind. The results are chapters that offer to the
non-specialists a brief overview of Celestina studies, allowing them to familiar-
ize themselves with the main topics and methods that have punctuated the
vast scholarship of this masterpiece. Those who already know the field will
