Celestina

A new translation of one of the classics of Spanish literature. This story of lovers, Calisto and Melibea, and their go-between, Celestina, became the first ever Spanish best-sellere after its publication in Burgos in 1499: over 50 editions and translations into English, Italian, French and German before 1550. Readers loved the racy realism of Celestina's world of prostitutes and black magic and mourned the fate of the lovers she united using her wiles as a seller of perfumes and potions to gain entry into the house of Melibea's parents. De Roja's original mix of street wit, obscenity and cultured rhetoric mark Celestina as one of the first prose masterpieces of European literature, a genre-defier paving the way for the picaresque novel and Cervantes. The work was written as Catholic monarchs, Fernando and Isabel, encouraged the Spanish Inquisition to persecute Jews and Muslims and Columbus and the conquistadors to take faith to 'new' worlds. Its popularity no doubt also stemmed from its atmosphere of heady excitement and apocalypse. After 1492 the Old World was doomed. AUTHOR: Fernando de Rojas was born in La Pueblo de Maontalban in the early 1470s into a family whose Jewish forbears had been forced to convert to Christianity. Some of de Roja's converso relatives were tried by the Inquisition and burnt at the stake. He wrote Celestina in his mid-twenties before graduating from the University of Salamanca in 1500. He subsequently lived as a lawyer in Talavera de la Reina where he died in 1541. In 1525 he defended his father-in-law against accusations by the Inquisition.