Celestina: heroine of the first European novel

The sleep of reason in reading Celestina

The first European novel and the first Spanish best-seller first appeared in 1499 under the title Comedia de Calisto y Melibea. By 1518, its title had become La Celestina. That title change indicates the attraction of one of the work’s characters, the celestial Celestina. A leading scholar of Spanish literature recently explained:

{Celestina} is an old whore and procuress who runs a brothel, restores virgins, arranges for clandestine sexual encounters, and corrupts young men and women. Yet, for all these unsavory characteristics and immoral activities, Celestina is a self-possessed, willful, and courageous character whom the reader cannot but admire. She is a modern tragic heroine [1]

Under a global trend toward repressive orthodoxy in thought and expression, imaginative literature like Celestina now might be regarded as dangerous and unacceptable. Yet Celestina remains “as fresh and relevant a work of fiction as if it had been written today.”

The original title characters Calisto and Melibea are much less interesting than Celestina. Calisto is a young, rich, well-educated noble completely immersed in the foolish delusions of courtly love. Calisto loves Melibea. Calisto’s religion is courtly love of Melibea. He explains:

I am a Melibean, and I worship Melibea and I put my faith in Melibea and I adore Melibea. … She is a goddess! A goddess! [2]

Calisto declares that the sight of her beautiful hair can turn men into stone, while the sight of her breasts rouses them.[3] Calisto perceives Melibea in a mash of classical myth and mundane reality:

Has her equal ever been born in the world? Did God create a sweeter form? Can such features, a model of beauty, be painted? If Helen were alive today, the one for whom so many Greeks and Trojans died, or the beautiful Polyxena, they would obey this comely mistress for whom I pine. Had she been present in that contest among the three goddesses for the golden apple, they would never have given it the name discord because, without dissent, they would have agreed that it be given to Melibea, and thus it would have been called the apple of concord. For women who know of her curse themselves. They wail to God because he did not remember them when he made this my sweet mistress. They use up their lives, envy gnaws their flesh, they inflict brutal martyrdom upon themselves, thinking that with artifice they will equal the perfection nature effortlessly bestowed on her. They thin their eyebrows with eyebrow pluckers and plasters and fine cords; they look for golden herbs, roots, branches, and flowers to make bleaches so their hair will be like hers; and they maul their faces, covering them in various hues of unguents and ointments, acid lotions, white and red paints, and powders that for the sake of brevity I will not detail.

Calisto considers himself unworthy of Melibea. Nonetheless, he intensely desires her.

Melibea lacks an ethical core. Her behavior rapidly shifts across extremes of values and desires. She presents herself as a genteel woman concerned for her reputation and her parents. When Celestina tells Melibea of Calisto’s deep devotion to her, Melibea viciously attacks her:

May you burn at the stake, you deceitful procuress, you vile convent-trotter, you witch, you enemy of decency, you cause of secret sins! Jesú, Jesú! Lucrecia! Take her from my sight. I am through; she has left no drop of blood in my body! The person who gives ear to such women deserves this and more. Were it not that it would reflect upon my purity, and spread the word of the audacity of this brash man, I would, you wicked drab, have seen that your words and your life were quickly ended. [4]

Melibea also cruelly disparages Calisto:

Jesú! I do not want to hear another word about this crazed wall jumper, this night specter, this leggy stork, this badly woven figure in a tapestry, lest I drop dead on the spot! This then is the man who saw me the other day and began to rant and rave and act the gallant. Tell him, my good woman, that if he thought everything already won and the field his, I listened because I thought it better to listen than to publicize his flaws; I wanted more to treat him as a madman than to spread word of his outrageous boldness.

Melibea’s attitude toward Calisto changes rapidly as Celestina spins out a story of Calisto’s toothache and his many noble attributes. Soon Melibea is suffering from exhausting swoons and heartaches. She urgently seeks a return visit from Celestina. Melibea prays to God:

I humbly ask you to bestow upon my wounded heart the patience to conceal my terrible passion! Do not strip away the fig leaf I have placed before my amorous desire, pretending my pain to be other and not what is tormenting me. But how shall I be able, when I am so cruelly aggrieved by the poison dealt me at the sight of that caballero. O shy and timid womankind! Why are women not given the power to reveal their anguishing and ardent love, as men are? O that Calisto should not live with a complaint, nor I with pain.

Subsequently meeting with Celestina, Melibea confesses her love for Calisto:

O my Calisto, my señor, my sweet and gentle joy! If your heart feels as mine does now, I marvel that my absence allows you to live. O Mother, Señora Celestina, if you want to save my life, find the way for me to see him soon.

Melibea subsequently relishes illicit sex with Calisto. After he dies in an accident, she commits suicide by jumping off a tower in the presence of her distraught, loving father.

Unlike Melibea, Celestina is a strong, independent woman, a professional, and a business-owner. One of Calisto’s servants engages her to arrange for Calisto to have sex with Melibea. The servant explains:

From some time now I have known a bearded old crone who lives at no great distance from here. A witch, astute, wise in every wickedness that exists, she calls herself Celestina. I understand that in this city over five thousand maidenheads have been restored and undone by her hand. If she puts her mind to it she can move rocks and stones to lust.

Celestina has six trades:

seamstress, perfumer, wondrous concocter of paints and powders, and restorer of maidenheads, procuress, and, on occasion, witch. The first office was cover for the others, under which pretense many girls, among them servants, came to her house to be stitched and to stitch neck coverings and many other things. None came without a rasher of bacon, wheat flour, a jug of wine, and other provisions they stole from their mistresses. And other thefts of even greater worth were hidden there. Celestina was friend to many students, and stewards, and servants of clerics, and to these she sold the innocent blood of the hapless girls who foolishly took risks on the basis of the restitution she promised them.

Celestina is the leading sex trafficker in the city. She declares:

Few virgins, praise God, have you seen open shop in this city for whom I have not been the agent of their first sale. When a girl is born I enter her name in my register in order to know how many escape my net. What were you thinking? Do you think I live on air? That I inherited an estate?

When Celestina is out walking, a hundred women call out, “old whore.” Dogs bark it, birds sing it, donkeys also bray out “old whore.” So too proclaim frogs. Craftsmen wielding tools of every shape and size hammer out that name. All of creation, even two rocks touched together, proclaim Celestina an old whore.[5]

Celestina is filled with wisdom. She is an expert on the ways of women. To a colleague questioning her ability to get Melibea to have sex with Calisto, Celestina explains:

For even if Melibea is a fierce opponent, she is not, may it please God, the first I have choked the cackle out of. They are all a bit skittish in the beginning, but after they have once been saddled they never want a rest. … And even as old as I am, God knows my longings. How much more these girls who boil without fire!

To a whore affecting reticence toward a suitor, Celestina says:

How plump and fresh you are! What breasts and all so lovely! … Do not be miserly with what has cost you so little. Do not hoard your loveliness, for it is by its nature as good an exchange as money. … Do not believe that you were created for no reason; when a she is born a he is born, and when a he, a she. Nothing is superfluous in the world, nor anything that nature does not provide for. What a sin it is to weary and torment men when they can be helped.

Celestina collects and concocts for medicines and cosmetics a wide array of exotic substances: root of aphodel, bark of sienna, benzoin, serpents’ venom, ointments from bears, horses, camels, whales, and other beasts, fruit pips, St. John’s wort, rosemary, musk, and many different types of threads.[6] Celestina is so learned that she speaks of love in rhetorical contrasts arising from learned Latin literature:

Love is a hidden fire, a pleasant wound, a delicious poison, a sweet bitterness, a delectable hurting, a happy torment, a sweet, fierce wound, a gentle death.

When Celestina tells Calisto that Melibea is in love with him and at his command, Calisto responds naively:

But speak to the conventions of courtly love, Mother. … Melibea is my beloved. Melibea is my goddess. Melibea is my life. I am her captive, I her servant.

Unlike Calisto, Celestina perceives and rejects men’s fruitless subordination in courtly love. She chides Calisto for his lack of self-confidence in relation to Melibea. Wisdom knows that to arouse women, nothing is more important for men than self-confidence. Celestina knows what many men don’t.

Celestina is a treacherous, self-centered, gluttonous schemer and liar. She lies to everyone effortlessly. Her words have no meaning other than her intent to manipulate. She dines on food that others have stolen. To ease her loneliness at night as an old whore, she drinks jugs of wine.[7] She has a knife scar on her face that seems to tell of a scheme gone wrong. When she attempts to cheat two of her men co-conspirators out the share of the booty from procuring Melibea for Calisto, they kill her. These men in turn are killed for their crime. Men’s lives matter much less than the life of the magnificent, admirable, modern tragic heroine Celestina.

Spain’s greatest living writer has applauded Celestina as representing our current world. In a text written about 2009, he declares:

Celestina portrays with disturbing lucidity and precision the fast-approaching universe of chaos and strife we now endure. … The only laws that rule the pitiless universe of Celestina are the sovereign edits of sexual pleasure and the cash nexus. … Does human life exist outside the laws of the market, or is it just one more product for sale? To the anguished question posed by growing inequalities, a close reading of Celestina brings us an inexorably negative answer from five hundred years ago: nature and its blind laws reduce us all to the status of an expendable commodity in a godless, iniquitous world. [8]

Such hackneyed bombast generates warm feels for today’s literary elite. No market has performed worse than the status market for literature and imagination. Celestina no longer represents an aberrational world.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

Notes:

[1] Roberto González Echevarría, Introduction, in Peden (2009) p. xiii. The subsequent quote is from id. On the title becoming La Celestina in 1518, id. p. xv. Bush & Goytisolo (2010), back cover, describes Celestina as “the first-ever Spanish bestseller.” See also Translator’s Afterword, id. p. 218. About seventy editions of Celestina were printed by 1605. Snow (2008) p. 82. Celestina was translated into Italian in 1505, adapted into English about 1525, and by the end of the seventeenth century translated into French, Flemish, German, Hebrew, and Latin. Celestina had considerable influence on Spanish literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ayllón (1958) pp. 284-5, Snow (2008).

[2] Celestina, from Spanish trans. Peden (2009) Act 1, pp. 10-2. Calisto’s servant Sempronio tries to enlighten Calisto with a brief review of themes from the literature of men’s sexed protest. Sempronio explains that women taught him that literature. Sempronio also asserts NAWALT:

Listen to Aristotle, look at Bernard. Gentiles, Jews, Christians, and Moors, are all in agreement. But despite what is said, and what women may say, do not commit the error of supposing all women are like that, for they are many, and some are saintly, virtuous, and noble, and their shining crowns exempt them from vituperation.

Act 1, pp. 13-4.

Celestina is available online in the original Spanish. Early editions of Celestina exist in shorter (16 acts) and longer (21 acts) versions. Peden’s translation is the longer version and includes paratext from early editions. In her Translator’s Note, Peden declared:

I wanted what appears on the English language page to be as close as possible to the original Spanish … I wanted to change as little as possible the tone of the original, which would be the inevitable effect in creating a more readable version.

Id. p. viii. Peden also expressed belief in the “true meaning” of words and in the existence of a “perfect translation.” Id. p. viii, x. Even for readers who lack such beliefs, they inspire confidence in Peden’s translation. I find her translation more readable and more enjoyable than that of Bush (2010).

All the subsequent quotes from and references to Celestina are based on Peden’s translation, cited by act and page. The quote sources: Act 6, pp. 95-6 (Has her equal …); Act 4, pp. 67-8 (May you burn …); Act 4, 68 (Jesú! I do not want to hear … ); Act 10, p. 141 (I humbly ask … ); Act 10, p. 149 (O my Calisto …); Act 1, p. 18 (From some time …); Act 1, p. 24 (seamstress …); Act 3, p. 49 (Few virgins …); Act 3, pp. 51-2 (For even if Melibea …); Act 7, 106-7 (How plump and fresh …); Act 10, p. 147 (Love is a hidden fire …); Act 11, p. 154 (But speak to the conventions …).

[3] In Greek myth, Medusa was a woman with a hideous face and venomous snakes for hair. Anyone who looked her in the eyes was turned to stone. Calisto incongruously adapts the Medusa myth in conjunction with a much more naturalistic claim about men’s sexual response.

[4] The epithet “convent-trotter” alludes to Trotaconventos of the fourteenth-century Spanish work Libro de buen amor.

[5] Celestina, Act 1, p. 23. Cf. Psalm 19:1-4. The description is from the servant Parmeno, who grew up with Celestina. Celestina describes much differently how the world addresses her. Act 9, p. 137.

[6] Celestina, Act 1, pp. 25-6; Act 7, p. 107. Other medieval texts similarly describe women collecting exotic materials for medicines, cosmetics, and witchcraft. See, e.g. the Mirror of Jaume Roig. Celestina uses letters written in blood on paper, serpent’s venom, and thread to conjure Pluto. Act 3, p. 55. Her actions in invoking Pluto are similar to erotic spells described in the Greek Magical Papyri, dating from the second to the fifth centuries.

[7] Celestina, Act 9, p. 129. Celestina’s extravagant praise of wine echoes an Arabic poetic tradition (wine poetry, in Arabic khamriyyah) dating from the sixth century. The ninth-century Arabic literary genius al-Jahiz made an important contribution to wine praise.

[8] Juan Goytisolo, Introduction, Bush (2010) pp. x, xi, xvi.  The biography blurb inside the front cover of id. describes Juan Goytisolo as “Spain’s greatest living writer.” In 2014, he won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize.

[image] The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueño de la razón produce monstruos). Etching by Francisco Goya, no. 43 in the series Los Caprichos.  Dated 1797-8.  See also no. 7,  Even Thus He Cannot Recognize Her (Ni así la distingue). Thanks to Museo del Prado (Madrid) and Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Ayllón, Cándido. 1958. “A Survey of Celestina Studies in the Twentieth Century. ” Pp. 283-99 in Mack Hendricks Singleton, trans. 1958. Celestina; a play in twenty-one acts, attributed to Fernando de Rojas. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Bush, Peter R., trans. and Juan Goytisolo, intro. 2010. Fernando de Rojas. Celestina. New York: Penguin Books.

Peden, Margaret Sayers, trans., and Roberto González Echevarría, ed. 2009. Fernando de Rojas. Celestina. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Snow, Joseph T. 2008. “Notes on Cervantes as a Reader/Renewer of Celestina.” Comparative Literature. 60 (1): 81-95.

Dante’s Boethius buried in Boccaccio’s Decameron X.9

Dante sees Boethius in Paradiso X

Raising his eyes to gaze rapturously at the Master’s work, Dante in Canto X of his Paradiso saw “living lights of blinding brightness.” Those lights were the souls of the twelve most eminent Christian thinkers. Dante with thirsting eagerness saw the soul of Boethius within the eighth light:

Within it rejoices, in his vision of all goodness,
the holy soul who makes quite plain
the world’s deceit to one who listens well.

The body from which it was driven out
lies down there in Cieldauro, and he has risen
from martyrdom and exile to this peace. [1]

Defending poetry, Boccaccio criticized those failing to fully understanding Boethius’s words, those who “consider them only superficially.”[2] Boccaccio’s Decameron X.9 magically returned the rich, noble Torello to the Church of Ciel D’Oro where Boethius’s body was buried. In Decameron X.9, Boccaccio responded to Dante with a vision of the true consolation of Lady Philosophy: personally loving, virtuous action in worldly living.

Decameron X.9 begins with a chance encounter between the mighty sultan Saladin and the gentleman Messer Torello di Stra da Pavia. Saladin along with two of his wisest senior counselors were disguised as merchants. Torello, together with servants, dogs, and falcons, was going to his country estate. Torello evidently was wealthy by the standards of European nobility. He was also an influential and respected public figure in his home city of Pavia. Lady Philosophy warned Boethius about valuing too highly wealth and power. Saladin and Torello were men with great wealth and power.

Torello extended lavish hospitality to Saladin and his companions. Since they were looking for lodgings, Torello had them guided to his country estate. There Torello hosted Saladin’s party with pleasant conversation, a meal, and comfortable beds. The next day Torello escorted Saladin’s party to his mansion in Pavia. Fifty leading citizens greeted Saladin’s party in Pavia and joined in a banquet in Torello’s great hall in honor of them. After the dinner was over and the leading gentlemen of Pavia had left, Torello’s wife met privately with Saladin and his companions. She gave them gifts of magnificent robes, doublets, and undergarments.[3] The three tired, old horses that Saladin and his companions rode were quietly replaced by three fine, sturdy palfreys. In response to Torello’s entreaties, Saladin’s party spent another day with him and enjoyed another magnificent feast with many noble guests. Torello had told them that he could not believe that they were merchants. Just before departing, Saladin told Torello, “we may yet have the chance to show you some of our merchandise and make a believer out of you.”[4] A deceit of the world is believing that merchants cannot be noble.

Saladin received an opportunity to make a believer out of Torello. On a Crusade attacking Saladin’s Islamic empire, Torello was captured. Torello’s skill as a falconer brought him into service to Saladin. One day Saladin recognized Torello. Saladin joyfully embraced him and declared that he would be co-ruler of his empire. Despite his new position of wondrous wealth and power, Torello still agonizingly yearned for his wife back home in Pavia. He told Saladin that he wanted either to die or to return home to his wife. Boethius’s Lady Philosophy would have applauded Torello’s valuing of wealth and power relative to being with his wife.

Saladin arranged to transport Torello home quickly. Torello was put to sleep on a bed. Torello thus took the position of Boethius at the beginning of the Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius was in bed in prison, deprived of wealth and honor, and facing execution. Saladin put Torello in bed with dazzling wealth: a extremely valuable crown, a ruby ring, a brooch studded with pearls and precious stones, two enormous golden bowls and doubloons, and much more. Torello in this bed was then magically transported within a single night to Boethius’s burial place, Pavia’s Church of San Pietro in Ciel D’Oro.[5] All in Pavia had believed that Torello was dead. Torello rose as a living man in Boethius’s burial place.

Torello’s return home warded off his wife’s remarriage. After she had mournfully passed the agreed one year, one month, and one day without Torello’s return, Torello’s wife was persuaded to take a new husband. Torello, disguised as an ambassador from Saladin, appeared at the nuptial banquet for his wife’s remarriage. A ring placed in a wine cup prompted her to recognize that the ambassador was really her first husband Torello. She overturned the banquet table in front of her and started shouting:

Then she dashed over to where he {Torello} was sitting, and without giving a thought to her clothing or any of the things on the table, she flung herself across it as far as she could and hugged him to her in a tight embrace. Nor could she be induced to let go of his neck, for anything the people there could say or do, until Messer Torello himself told her to exercise a little self-control, for she would have plenty of time to embrace him later on. [6]

They lived happily together as a wealthy and honored couple for many years thereafter.

Boccaccio framed with worldly reality Decameron X.9’s vision of all goodness. The narrator Panfilo recognized human failures in love:

even though our defects may prevent us from winning the deepest sort of friendship with another person, by imitating the things you hear about in my tale, we may at least derive a certain delight from being courteous to others and hope that sooner or later we will receive our reward for doing so. [7]

Decameron X.9 isn’t told as just a marvelous romance. It’s a moral exemplum showing tribulations ended under the economy of punishment, reward, and credit:

This, then, was how the tribulations of Messer Torello and his beloved wife came to an end, and how they were rewarded for their prompt and cheerful acts of courtesy. There are many people who strive to do the like, but although they have the wherewithal, they perform such deeds so ineptly that before they are finished, those who receive them wind up paying more for them than they are worth. And so, if people get no credit for what they do, neither they nor anyone else should be surprised.

That’s a divine comedy of merchant philosophy and aristocratic performance. That’s Boccaccio’s deep reading of the concluding prayer of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

Notes:

[1] Dante, Commedia, Paradiso X.124-9, from Italian trans. Robert Hollander at the Princeton Dante Project. The previous quote is from X.64. Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy influenced Casella’s song and Cato’s rebuke (Purgatorio II.76-133), Beatrice dispelling the false lady of Dante’s dream (Purgatorio XIX.1-33), and Beatrice’s sudden appearance as a guide for Dante (Purgatorio XXX.49-145). More generally, just as Consolation of Philosophy has Lady Philosophy instructing Boethius, Dante’s Commedia features a series of knowledgeable guides (Virgil, Beatrice, Statius, Bernard of Clairvaux) leading a troubled man. Goddard (2011) argues that Dante included within his Commedia a typological fufillment of Philosophy’s attempt to console Boethius.

[2] Boccaccio, Geneologia deorum gentilium XIV.20, from Latin trans. Osgood (1956) pp. 94-5.

[3] The gifts of undergarments emphasizes intimate friendship.

[4] Boccaccio, Decameron X.9, from Italian trans. Rebhorn (2013) p. 827. Roman aristocratic ideals of Latin antiquity are important context for Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Donato (2013) Ch. 1.

[5] Singleton (1970), p. 188, observes:

He {Boethius} was buried in the church of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, where in 722 a tomb was erected to his memory by Liutprand, king of the Lombards; this was replaced in 990 by a more magnificent one erected by the Emperor Otto III, for which Pope Sylvester II wrote an inscription.

[6] Decameron X.9, trans. Rebhorn (2013) p. 837.

[7] Decameron X.9, trans. id. p. 820. The Latin etymology of Panfilo is “all loving,” with loving carrying the sense of earnest care for the good of the other, as in deep friendship. The subsequent quote is from id. p. 838.

[image] Illumination of Dante’s Paradiso X, showing twelve lights of the Church, including Boethius. From manuscript of Dante’s Divina Commedia, made about 1444 to 1450 in Northern Italy. BL Yates Thompson 36, fol. 147. Thanks to the British Library and Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Donato, Antonio. 2013. Boethius’ Consolation of philosophy as a product of late antiquity. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Goddard, Victoria Emma Clare. 2011. Poetry and Philosophy in Boethius and Dante. Thesis (Ph.D.)–University of Toronto.

Osgood, Charles Grosvenor. 1956. Boccaccio on poetry; being the preface and the fourteenth and fifteenth books of Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium in an English version with introductory essay and commentary. New York: Liberal Arts Press.

Rebhorn, Wayne A., trans. 2013. Giovanni Boccaccio. The Decameron. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Singleton, Charles S., trans. and commentary. 1970. Dante Alighieri. The divine comedy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Calisto set up for raping Melibea under new sex regulations

New sex regulations now sweeping America commonly require ongoing, affirmative consent for any form of activity construed as sexual (including touching, kissing, etc.). Affirmative consent means getting a specific verbal or non-verbal indication of agreement prior to the particular act. Affirmative consent for one specific act (touching) doesn’t imply consent to another specific act (kissing). Consent may be revoked at any time. Prior relationship between the parties, even marriage, is irrelevant to consent under this strict regime of individual-act sex contracting.

North Korean totalitarian traffic girl

Under these new sex regulations, before you hug your lover, you must ask for permission. Before you kiss him, you must ask for additional permission. Whether you have to ask permission again before kissing him again is unclear. Who to petition for a prior judgment on such matters, or at least for detailed guidelines, also isn’t clear. According to Ohio State University’s regulations on sexual violence, deception invalidates consent. Whether dyeing your grey hair blonde counts as deception isn’t clear (the regulations haven’t yet defined sexual deception). For further guidance on proper sexual conduct and respect for others, you might watch Concordia University’s “Feminism for Bros” teaching video. To appreciate more fully these regulations, consider how they set Calisto up for a charge of raping Melibea in the medieval Spanish masterpiece La Celestina.

The young noble Calisto ardently desired the young genteel Melibea. Duped by his servants, Calisto engaged the wickedly deceptive go-between Celestina to further his suit. Melibea had initially rebuffed Calisto. However, with trickery, flattery, and puffery, Celestina stirred Melibea to ardent desire for Calisto. Conversing across a closed door of her house, Melibea told Calisto:

Señor Calisto, your great merit, your boundless graces, your high birth have, after I had a complete account of you, been cause for my being unable to tear you from my heart. And although I have struggled for many days to hide it, I have since that woman brought your sweet name to my mind been unable to keep secret my desire. I have come to this place and time, where I beg to hear your orders, and ask that you direct my person as you wish. [1]

Calisto was willing to break the door down to consummate their relationship. Melibea, however, warned him off that action. She arranged instead a tryst with him in her garden at midnight on the next night.

Brushing off concern for the sudden criminal execution of two of his men, Calisto arrived at Melibea’s garden the next night. Without securing affirmative consent from Melibea, Calisto hugged her. He said to her:

O angelic image! O precious pearl, next to whom the whole world is ugly. O my dear mistress and my glory! I hold you in my arms, and I do not believe it. Such a whirlwind of pleasure dwells within me that I cannot feel my joy.

Melibea responded fearfully:

My señor, I put myself in your hands because I wanted to do your will; may I not be worse for being merciful rather than aloof and without mercy. Do not harm me in exchange for such brief pleasure, and in so short a time. For when bad things are done, they can sooner be reprehended than mended. Enjoy what I enjoy, which is to see you and be close to you. Do not ask for, or take, that which once taken will not be in your power to return. Take care, Señor, not to harm what all the world’s treasures cannot restore.

Melibea is referring to her virginity. That reference gains extra piquancy from Celestina “mending maidenheads” in her business of running a brothel. She reportedly sold to the French ambassador three times a girl that she represented to be a virgin.[2] Calisto rebuffed Melibea’s concern for her virginity:

Sweet mistress, I have spent my lifetime in obtaining this favor; would I, when it is given me, toss it away? You will not command me, sweet mistress, nor will I be able, to restrain my desire. Do not ask me to be so fainthearted. No one who is a man could be capable of doing such a thing, particularly not loving as much as I do.

Even in mid-thrust, under criminal law a man must stop if his partner stops consenting. Melibea here objected to Calisto’s touching:

‘Pon my life! Though your tongue may speak what it wishes, deter your hands from doing as they want! Still them, my señor. Be content that I am yours. Enjoy outwardly the time-honored fruit of lovers: hold back your wish to steal the greatest gift nature has given me!

Calisto seems to have interpreted Melibea’s words as a pretense of modesty. He continued and pretended to be repentant:

Forgive, dear girl, my reprehensible and shameless hands that with their unworthiness never thought to touch even your clothing; now they rejoice in reaching your sweet body and beautiful, delicate flesh.

At this point Melibea dismissed her co-conspiring servant. That makes no sense if Melibea actually wanted Calisto to stop touching her and not continue on to sex. Nonetheless, after dismissing her servant, Melibea lamented:

I want none of my error. If I had thought that you would have your way with me so immoderately, I would not have entrusted my person to your cruel company.

Melibea didn’t affirmatively consent to have sex with Calisto during their secret meeting in the garden after midnight. After having sex, Melibea expressed deeply felt regret and fear:

O my life, my señor! How much have you wanted that I lose the title and crown of virgin for such brief delight? O Mother! Sinner! If you had knowledge of such a thing, how willingly you would welcome death, and have need to take mine by force! How you would be the cruel executioner of your own blood! How I would become the sorrowful end to your days! O my honored father, how I have stained your reputation and given cause and place to the downfall of your house! O what a traitor I am! Why did I not first look at the ruinous error that would follow his entering, the great danger that awaited? [3]

Under the sex regulations that govern most college students in the U.S. today, Calisto would be formally guilty of sexual assault and rape. But ongoing, affirmative consent for every specific type of intimate activity wasn’t required for romantic encounters in medieval Spain. Educated persons in medieval Spain understood that persons use words in sophisticated, highly cultured ways. Educated persons in medieval Spain understood that no doesn’t always mean no, nor yes, yes. Humane, perceptive persons in the Middle Ages knew that mixed emotions are an aspect of human experience and that regret sometimes follows desired sex.

Melibea and Calisto’s first sexual encounter concluded with a pointer to her delight in their sexual relationship. Despite her regret and fear, Melibea said to Calisto as he left her at the end of that first night:

Señor, God be with us. Everything is yours. Now I am your dear mistress; now you cannot deny my love; now you cannot refuse me a sight of you by day, passing by my door, or at night, where you command. May you come to this secret place at the same hour, where I always await you anticipating the joy you leave with me, and thinking of nights to come. [4]

To ease his pain from being apart from her, Calisto later joyfully recalled to himself Melibea’s equivocations :

sweet imagination, you that can, come to my aid. Bring to my fantasy the angelic presence of that radiant image; carry to my ears the soft sound of her words: those palely uttered parries, that “Step back. Señor, do not come near me,” that “Do not be ill-mannered” I heard from your rosy lips; that “Do not covet my perdition” that you proposed from time to time; those loving embraces between words; that letting me go and clasping me to you; that fleeing and approaching; those sugared kisses … Those last words with which she bade me farewell left her lips with such pain! With such waving of arms! With so many tears resembling seeds of pearls that fell without her awareness from her clear, shining eyes!

Despite questionable aspects of their initial sexual encounter, Melibea and Calisto seem to have been pleased with it. They subsequently had eight similar midnight trysts in the garden in the next month.[5]

Celestina describes Calisto and Melibea’s ninth midnight tryst in more detail. Melibea welcomed Calisto with exuberant joy. She chided her servant-woman for longingly touching Calisto (apparently without affirmative consent) as she took his weapons and clothes. Melibea also teased Calisto with denial of her consent for sexual intimacies:

since you, my señor, are the exemplar of courtesy and good breeding, how do you command my tongue to speak but not your roving hands to remain quiet? Why do you not forget their artful tricks? Order them to be at rest and leave their irritating ways and unsupportable manners. Look, my angel, just having you quiet beside me is agreeable to me, but your roughness is annoying. Your honorable games give me pleasure, your dishonorable hands exhaust me when they surpass what is reasonable. Leave my clothing in place, and if you wish to see if my outer gown is of silk or cotton, why do you touch my shift? You know it is of linen. We can frolic and play in a thousand different ways that I will show you, but do not hurt and mistreat me as you are wont to do. What benefit is it to you to damage my clothing?

Melibea’s servant-woman provides context for interpreting Melibea’s sophisticated complaints:

May I die of buboes if I listen any longer. This is life? Here am I burning with jealousy, and she being elusive in order to be begged! … I could do the same if his idiot servants would talk to me someday, but they wait until I have to go and seek them.

Men shoulder a vastly unequal gender burden of initiating and pursuing sexual relationships. Women and men’s pleasure in men’s boldness and women’s reluctance tends to criminalize men in heterosexual seduction.

While Melibea expressed regret after first-time sex with Calisto, she committed suicide in grief at Calisto’s accidental death. Part of Melibea’s regret at losing her virginity was fear of her parents’ reaction. That fear didn’t dominate her preferences. She subsequently acted strongly to dissuade her parents from arranging a marriage for her. She boldly informed her father how “his {Calisto’s} desire and mine” was realized:

Vanquished by his love, I let him into your house. With ladders he overcome the walls of your garden, just as he overcame my resistance. I lost my virginity. From that pleasureful error of love we took joy for nearly a month.

In narrating the realization of their desires, Melibea credited Calisto with skill and strength. She didn’t charge him with acting wrongly. She then, in anguish from Calisto’s death, committed suicide by jumping off a tower in front of her father’s eyes.

Totalitarian sex regulations indicate societal suicide. The new sex laws and policies now sweeping America are so unrealistic as to make almost everyone who ever had sex a perpetrator of rape, or sexual assault, or sexual misconduct. Rape has always been regarded as a relatively serious crime. Making everyone a sex criminal and blurring very different categories of wrongs makes a mockery of law, fairness, and justice.[6] Even amid the lies, delusions, greed, immorality, and treachery of La Celestina, no voice in that text accuses Calisto of raping Melibea.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

Notes:

[1] Celestina, from Spanish trans. Peden (2009) Act 12, p. 167. Celestina  is available online in the original Spanish. All the subsequent quotes from Celestina are from Peden’s translation, cited by act and page. The quote sources: Act 14, pp. 189-92 (O angelic image …  and subsequent seven quotes);  Act 14, p. 197 (sweet imagination …); Act 19, pp. 230-1 (since you, my señor, are the exemplar … and subsequent quote); Act 20, p. 240 (Vanquished by his love …).

[2] Act 1, p. 25. Report according to Calisto’s servant Parmeno.

[3] Melibea moves from speaking to Calisto (O my life, my señor!), to speaking to her mother (O Mother!), to self-address in the voice of her mother (Sinner!), back to addressing her mother (If you had knowledge …), to addressing her father (O my honored father), and then to her self (Why did I not first look …). Those shifts in address suggest intensity of feeling. Her regret and fear don’t seem feigned.

[4] Peden’s translation includes the sentence fragment, “At night, where you command.” The sense seems to me connected to the previous sentence. I’ve thus made a small change in the quote above. Singleton’s translation supports my change. Singleton (1958) p. 201.

[5] Calisto’s servant Sosia revealed this fact in response to Areúsa’s guileful questioning. Act 17, Peden (2009) p. 217.

[6] The new sex crime laws and policies are being enacted in the context of widespread lying, scare-mongering,and anti-men bigotry in reporting facts about sexual assault, contempt for due process of men accused of these crimes, and vastly gender-disproportionate imprisonment of men. In that social context, promoting those laws and polices is particularly benighted.

[image] Woman traffic officer at a crossroad in Pyongyang, North Korea, Sept. 5, 2010. Thanks to Roman Harak for making this photo available under a Creative Commons By-SA 2.0 license.

References:

Peden, Margaret Sayers, trans., and Roberto González Echevarría, ed. 2009. Fernando de Rojas. Celestina. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Singleton, Mack Hendricks, trans. 1958. Celestina; a play in twenty-one acts, attributed to Fernando de Rojas. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.