This book studies the reception of Celestina (1499) in the sixteenth century by reading it against or through the lens of several influential Spanish and Italian books published in the first part of that century. These books dealt with what the author defines as aspects of the human condition. She is referring to what she identifies as the contemporary debates about self-knowledge, self-fashioning, and self-determination (19). These debates are placed in the book within the bigger discussion of the dignity of man, or better said, of the misery vs. the dignity of man, a subject that was undergoing major shifts in early modernity. The author clarifies that she is not claiming any direct influences of Celestina in the books adduced but exploring how the readers of those books may have interpreted certain passages of Celestina that deal with similar issues of being human. The underlying argument is that Celestina was popular in the sixteenth century because it dealt with issues about being human that were paramount at the dawning of modernity.

The first text against which Celestina is read is Fernán Pérez de Oliva’s Diálogo de la dignidad del hombre (1546), in which one of the interlocutors argues against self-knowledge as a useless, even dangerous achievement. The author reads in this light the painful illuminations of the characters in Celestina, especially of Melibea and Pleberio, which lead them to isolation and alienation. Furthermore, Pleberio’s desperation is presented as an anticipation of the disbelief in divine Providence that was gaining ground in society. The second book used as a sounding board for the reception of Celestina is Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (1528). In this light, Celestina is read as an exploration of an as yet untheorized capacity of language, namely, the power of language in self-fashioning. But unlike Il Cortegiano, Celestina highlights the many pitfalls in this task. For instance, Calisto and Melibea are trapped in the literary discourse of courtly love to the point that they cannot really communicate. Similarly, Rojas’s book proves the inability of language to create social cohesion or personal identity. The next two and final chapters deal with Aretino’s La vita delle puttane (1535) and its Spanish, highly modified translation, Fernán Xuárez’s Coloquio de las damas (1547). Aretino’s book is seen as a discussion on agency in which the life of Venetian prostitutes is presented as an example of personal freedom limited by social marginality. In this light, Celestina presents similar contradictions between the supposed freedom of prostitutes and their limitations as poor, exploited women: Areúsa seems to exert freedom but her apparent choices are merely the consequences of her poverty. The next chapter argues that Xuárez’s altered translation is a diatribe against the dangers posed by the prostitute and by corrupting books, especially fictional literature. This is the least convincing of the chapters since the similarity between prostitutes and books is tenuous.

In general, the book is thoroughly documented and opens an interesting venue to analyze Celestina. It started as a dissertation and has all the virtues and defects of this kind of text. At the same time, some of the book chapters have been published in separate articles, with the result that the book does not flow smoothly from chapter to chapter. The two most innovative aspects of the book are the insights of how the translations of Celestina and other texts between Spanish and Italian changed in meaning, as well as punctual remarks on how the presence of engravings and typographical decisions in some editions of Celestina reveal how interpretative decisions taken by the printers influenced the readers. The other innovative aspect is the new reading of passages of Celestina, which, when interpreted through the selected later texts, acquire interesting meanings. However, without further proof, it is difficult to establish that early modern readers who had read these texts came up with those interpretations of Celestina. More factual arguments, as the ones about the use of specific engravings and marginalia, would reinforce these interpretations.