The Celestina is considered by scholars to be the first European novel. Written in fifteenth-century Spain, this masterpiece is remarkable for its originality, depth, handling of dialogue, and drawing of character. The novel's focus is the character of Celestina, who dominates the scene. An old bawd brimming with salty wisdom derived from a vigorous and sinful life, she is one of the great creations in all of literature and holds a secure place beside her two compatriots, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. This Spanish classic, a forebear of Cervantes, was originally published anonymously in 1499; later editions bear the name of Fernando de Rojas as author.

In A Companion to Celestina, Enrique Fernandez brings together twenty-three hitherto unpublished contributions on the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, popularly known as Celestina (c. 1499) written by leading experts who summarize, evaluate and expand on previous studies. The resulting chapters offer the non-specialist an overview of Celestina studies. Those who already know the field will find state of the art studies filled with new insights that elaborate on or depart from the well-established currents of criticism. Celestina's creation and sources, the parody of religious and erudite traditions, the treatment of magic, prostitution, the celestinesca and picaresque genre, the translations into other languages as well as the adaptations into the visual arts (engravings, paintings, films) are some of the topics included in this companion. Contributors are: Beatriz de Alba-Koch, Raúl Álvarez Moreno, Consolación Baranda, Ted L. Bergman, Patrizia Botta, José Luis Canet, Fernando Cantalapiedra, Ricardo Castells, Ivy Corfis, Manuel da Costa Fontes, Enrique Fernandez, José Luis Gastañaga Ponce de León, Ryan D. Giles, Yolanda Iglesias, Gustavo Illades Aguiar, Kathleen V. Kish, Bienvenido Morros Mestres, Devid Paolini, Antonio Pérez Romero, Amaranta Saguar García, Connie Scarborough, Joseph T. Snow, and Enriqueta Zafra.

As a major piece of historical detective work. Stephen Gilman's "La Celestina" and the Spain of Fernando de Rojas adds a new dimension to critical studies of the fifteenth-century masterpiece. Using the text of La Celestina as well as public and private archives in Spain, Mr. Oilman builds up a vivid sense of the man behind the dialogue and establishes Fernando de Rojas indisputably as its author—a figure whom critics, while ranking his novel second only to Don Quixote, have treated as semi-anonymous or non-existent. We cannot really know what the Celestina is, says Mr. Oilman, without speculating as rigorously and as learnedly as possible both on how it came to be and on how it could come to be. Thus he reconstructs the world of Rojas, country lawyer and converso, the social, religious, and intellectual milieu of Salamanca, of Spain during the Inquisition, of the converted Jew. He makes it possible for us to see the author—the law student writing feverishly during a fortnight's vacation from classes—in the context of his own times and thus to understand Rojas' achievement: his unconventionality; his sardonic judgment of the Spain in which he lived; the explosive originality, in fact, of La Celestina. Originally published in 1972. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Published in 1499 and centered on the figure of a bawd and witch, Fernando de Rojas' dark and disturbing Celestina was destined to become the most suppressed classic in Spanish literary history. Routinely ignored in Spanish letters, the book nonetheless echoes through contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature. This is the phenomenon that Celestina's Brood explores. Roberto González Echevarría, one of the most eminent and influential critics of Hispanic literature writing today, uses Rojas' text as his starting point to offer an exploration of modernity in the Hispanic literary tradition, and of the Baroque as an expression of the modern. His analysis of Celestina reveals the relentless probing of the limits of language and morality that mark the work as the beginning of literary modernity in Spanish, and the start of a tradition distinguished by a penchant for the excesses of the Baroque. González Echevarría pursues this tradition and its meaning through the works of major figures such as Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Nicolás Guillén, and Severo Sarduy, as well as through the works of lesser-known authors. By revealing continuities of the Baroque, Celestina's Brood cuts across conventional distinctions between Spanish and Latin American literary traditions to show their profound and previously unimagined affinity.

La Celestina, a Spanish literary masterpiece second only in importance to Don Quixote in Spanish literature, has been shaped by the inclusion of images from its very first edition in 1499. The subsequent five centuries were punctuated by many illustrated editions; imaginary portraits of the eponymous procuress Celestina by painters such as Murillo, Goya, and Picasso; and, more recently, screen and stage adaptations. Celestina became the prototype from which later representations of procuresses and bawds derived. The Image of Celestina sheds light on the visual culture that developed around La Celestina, including paintings, illustrations, and advertisements. Enrique Fernández examines La Celestina as a mixed-media text, incorporating methods from disciplines such as art history and women’s and cinema studies, and considers a variety of images including promotional posters, lobby pictures, and playbills of theatrical and cinematic adaptations of the book. Using a visual studies approach, The Image of Celestina ultimately illuminates the culture of Celestina, a mythical figure, who surpasses the literary text in which she originated.

When towards the end of the XV century a young law student at the University of Salamanca, Spain —Fernando de Rojas—wrote La Celestina, little did he know that he was creating a literary masterpiece, a work that would confer him immortality. For much of his life he kept a low profile because the Inquisition was relentless in its persecution of heretics. The least indiscretion could have caused him loss of reputation, property, and even his life. Humorous and ribald in its language, Celestina is a continuous dialogue in which masters and servants participate, with Celestina in its midst. Through the characters' dialogue much of the Spanish soul of those times has been revealed and learned, and by extension, of the human condition

This book examines the reason and intent behind the many Senecan and pseudo-Senecan quotations in Fernando de Rojas' masterpiece Celestina (1499), which enjoyed enormous popularity in sixteenth-century Europe. The author considers the importance attached to Senecan thought in the oral, scholarly and literary traditions of fifteenth-century Spain and demonstrates how readers' tastes and sensibilities were shaped by it. The main themes of Celestina, such as self-seeking friendship and love, pleasure and sorrow, gifts and riches, greed, suicide and death, are shown to be rooted in this intellectual background. The Senecan tradition, albeit treated in a satirical vein, is also seen as underlying the later additions and interpolations to the text, with a shift towards Seneca's tragedies in response to changes in fashion; Professor Fothergill-Payne reveals that even the Petrarchan quotations in Celestina have Senecan sources. Seneca and Celestina thus offers a fresh perspective on the literary and intellectual sources that shaped this famous book.