Seneca and Celestina

This book examines the reason and intent behind the many Senecan and pseudo-Senecan quotations in Fernando de Rojas' masterpiece Celestina.

Louise Fothergill-Payne (Author)

9780521121187, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 15 October 2009

192 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.1 cm, 0.29 kg

This book examines the reason and intent behind the many Senecan and pseudo-Senecan quotations in Fernando de Rojas' masterpiece Celestina (1499), which enjoyed enormous popularity in sixteenth-century Europe. The author considers the importance attached to Senecan thought in the oral, scholarly and literary traditions of fifteenth-century Spain and demonstrates how readers' tastes and sensibilities were shaped by it. The main themes of Celestina, such as self-seeking friendship and love, pleasure and sorrow, gifts and riches, greed, suicide and death, are shown to be rooted in this intellectual background. The Senecan tradition, albeit treated in a satirical vein, is also seen as underlying the later additions and interpolations to the text, with a shift towards Seneca's tragedies in response to changes in fashion; Professor Fothergill-Payne reveals that even the Petrarchan quotations in Celestina have Senecan sources. Seneca and Celestina thus offers a fresh perspective on the literary and intellectual sources that shaped this famous book.

List of illustrations
Preface
List of abbreviations
1. Towards a Senecan tradition
2. Senecan commentary as a frame of reference
3. The 'antiguo autor' as a reader of Seneca
4. Fernando de Rojas continues the story: the Comedia de Calisto y Melibea
5. Res et verba in Seneca, Petrarch and Rojas
6. Readers ask for more: the Tragicomedia del Calisto y Melibea
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index of Senecan 'sententiae'
General index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]