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.