ABSTRACT
Celestina is a long dramatic masterpiece written in the last decade of the fifteenth century by Fernando de Rojas, then a precocious student at the University of Salamanca. It presents one of the most memorable pictures of a Spanish community that can be found anywhere in western literature. This chapter considers some of the aspects of Spanish psychology and everyday lifestyles of the people that Rojas presented in this multifaceted, delightful depiction of love, greed, hypocrisy, sex, frustration, and death. The characters involved are Celestina, the bawd; her two protegees, Elicia and Areusa; Calisto the handsome lover; and his two servants, Sempronio and Pármeno; and Melibea, the love object, who lives with her parents and a maid. Celestina’s profession as a bawd was condemned in the fifteenth century much as it evidently is today. Everyone knew her as the woman of the town, or at least had heard of Celestina and her girls.
