Is Celestina a medieval work?

Abstract

A work like Celestina, published in its first version (Comedia de Calisto y Melibea) in 1499 and in its second (Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea) in 1502(?) will always cause problems for those historians of literature (and others) who see their subject as divided into periods. The university in which I taught for almost forty years grouped the work, in an ‘early texts’ paper, with the Poema de mio Cid and the Libro de buen amor as clearly ‘medieval’. When I reviewed the edition produced by Sir Peter Russell in 1991 for the Clasicos Castalia series, I remarked in passing ‘this edition appears in the orange cover which, in Castalia’s scheme, corresponds to Renaissance texts, rather than the green of the Middle Ages [...] Although this small point was undoubtedly a decision of the publishers rather than of the editor, one wonders whether he approved’ (Pattison 1993: 101). The imposition of such artificial boundaries as century limits to ‘periods of literature’ is, of course, bound to be arbitrary and may lead to the imposition of varied criteria: it is interesting to note that the Modern Humanities Research Association’s Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies rather idiosyncratically draws the boundaries of the Spanish Golden Age as 1470–1700 rather than making it correspond with the 16th and 17th centuries; and Peter Russell’s Spain: A Companion to Spanish Studies (1973) put the boundary between the Middle Ages and the Golden Age at 1474 (for both history and literature). We can agree that all such boundaries, and all such categorization, are to some extent meaningless. Nevertheless, some criticism of Celestina has concentrated on its interesting, not to say emblematic position, poised on the cusp, as it were, of one possible demarcation line, however arbitrary, between the medieval and the modern world, that is, 1500. My purpose here is to look again at this question of literary historiography, while admitting that no definitive or sensible conclusion is wholly possible.