A Companion to “Celestina” brings together twenty-three essays on this canonical Spanish text, many by well-known scholars. The collection aims to offer an up-to-date panorama in English of existing research and covers a comprehensive range of topics and approaches. Essays begin with a summary and evaluation of previous scholarship while contributors also present their own interpretations. Citations not in English are translated, and the book concludes with a list of electronic resources, editions in English, commonly cited critical editions, and select bibliography. As such, the collection will be particularly useful for nonspecialists and students new to the work; however, editor Enrique Fernandez also hopes that it will make Celestina visible among non-Hispanists, encouraging scholars in other disciplines to make connections between it and their own research.
Following an introduction to Celestina’s significance, plot, authorship, print history, and reception, by Joseph T. Snow, the collection is divided into three sections. In the first, “Texts, Origins and Sources,” essays by José Luís Canet and Fernando Cantalapiedra Erostarbe consider Celestina’s authorship and textual history, touching upon the complexities of medieval book production and the manuscrito de Palacio, respectively. The work's genre is the focus of Gustavo Illades Aguiar, who discusses performativity, orality, rhetoric, and dialogism, and Devid Paolini, who locates Celestina within the revival of humanistic comedies in fifteenth-century university cities. Amaranta Saguar García and José Luis Gastañaga Ponce de León address Spanish humanistic learning, focusing respectively on intertextuality and the role of the studia humanitatis in society. Finally, Diego de San Pedro's Cárcel de amor and the story of Hero and Leander are considered as possible sources by Ivy A. Corfis and Bienvenido Morros Mestres.
Essays in the second section, “Themes and Readings,” cover some of the major topics surrounding Celestina’s intellectual, political, and social context. Ryan D. Giles argues that the treatment of parody goes beyond humor to address serious concepts such as materiality, friendship, and the fragmentation of self and society, while Enriqueta Zafra looks at prostitution as a means of exploring moral and legal issues. Raúl Álvarez-Moreno considers how the urban landscape depicted functions as an ideological space in which to conceptualize the relationship between the individual and the community. Patrizia Botta covers the well-debated topic of magic, providing an overview of various approaches, and includes a bibliography of scholarship published on this theme since 1993. Ricardo Castells considers the representation of lovesickness via an examination of the textual difficulties of act 1 and its argumento, and Manuel da Costa Fontes argues that the use of prayer, religious imagery, and scriptural material reflects the author's converso attitude. Finally, Connie Scarborough explores food and drink as a metaphor for reading and textual consumption.
The final section, “Influence and Posterity,” focuses on the work's reception and later artistic afterlives. Antonio Pérez-Romero looks at certain “manifestos” of modernity in Celestina’s portrayal of individualism and capitalism, human rights, and the common good, while its impact on literary production is addressed by Ted L. L. Bergman, Kathleen V. Kish, and Consolación Baranda. Bergman explores Celestina’s status as a generic precursor to the picaresque; Kish provides a panoramic overview of translations and shows how they shed light on aspects of Celestina’s meaning; and Baranda argues that the continuations and adaptations reflect developments in sixteenth-century literary genres. The final three essays address the work's lasting impact on visual culture. Beatriz de Alba-Koch explores Celestina’s impact outside of Europe in nineteenth-century paintings by Mexican José Agustín Arrieta, while Enrique Fernandez considers how representations of the eponymous character in woodcuts and Dutch and Spanish paintings responded to fresh readings. Reworkings of Celestina for film and television are the focus of Yolanda Iglesias, who provides an appendix of screen adaptations.
The collection's range is one of its strengths: it allows readers unfamiliar with Celestina and its bibliography an easily accessible overview of existing scholarship. However, this is, conversely, also where it might have less impact, particularly for scholars familiar with the work, as the summative discussions with which each essay opens limit detailed exploration or the development of arguments that go beyond established lines of criticism—perhaps an inevitable consequence of restrictions on space in such volumes. The essays that work best offer insights into where scholarship can go next, such as those by Paolini and Giles. Furthermore, while the desire to promote Celestina within the international literary arena is valid and necessary, the collection itself falls short of providing a model for the sort of interdisciplinary and internationally focused research it hopes to inspire. Apart from Kish's and Alba-Koch's contributions, essays remain within the fields of Hispanic and peninsular Spanish studies. The collection would have been enriched by including scholars outside of these areas who work on Celestina and demonstrate the sort of cross-disciplinarity the editor wishes to inspire. Overall, however, the book achieves its objective of offering a comprehensive companion to one of Europe's premodern masterpieces and will be of particular value to nonspecialist anglophone readers.
