The late fifteenth-century Spanish masterpiece Celestina is one of the
world's classics. In this important study, Dorothy Sherman Severin
investigates how Fernando de Rojas' work in dialogue, which parodies
earlier genres, is a precursor of the modern novel. In Celestina, the
hero Calisto parodies the courtly lover, the heroine Melibea lives
through classical examples and popular students' knowledge, the bawd and
go-between Celestina deals a blow to the world of wisdom literature, and
Melibea's father Pleberio gives his own gloss on the lament. There is
also a fatal clash between two literary worlds, that one of the
self-styled courtly lover (the fool) and the prototype picaresque world
of the Spanish Bawd and her mentors (the rogues). The voices of
Celestina are parodic, satiric, ironic and occasionally tragic, and it
is in their discourse that the dialogue world of the modern novel is
born. In order to make this book accessible to a wider English-speaking
readership, quotations from the text are accompanied by English
translations, mainly from the seventeenth-century English version by
James Mabbe.