municating myself to many, I should, as it were, deflower my embassage, whose maidenhead I mean to bestow on your master" (Rojas 37-8).
In dramatic terms, the romance of Melibea and Calisto is interesting only for the fact of its fifteenth-century "onstage" presentation. The character of the witch-procuress Celestina is far more compelling (Wardropper 795). Celestina is murdered well before the end of the play, but she is a prime mover of action. It is inconceivable that a low-born person would be given scope in Roland, but in Celestina, Calisto lacks the boldness to pursue his seduction of Melibea without making use of servants and a go-between, who have fairly busy lives independent of their masters. When he hears of Celestina's death, Calisto is obliged to pay attention to it and accurately anticipates "more ill behind" it, although he adds that "the old woman was wicked and false" (Rojas 80).
The social position of Celestina is quite low and undoubtedly in disrepute, although because of the services she provides she appears to move with relative ease among all classes of society. Parmeno's description of her procuring activities specifically puts her in conflict with values of Spain's dominant institution, the Church:
Nay, she had access with more secluded virgins and would deal with these at the time of early mass or the stations of the cross. . . . She would . . . never miss mass nor vespers, nor neglect the monasteries: they were the markets where she made her bargains (Rojas 14).
This description does not exactly lampoon the Church, but it does make instrumental use of religion for comic effect in a way that cannot have pleased devout churchmen. That may owe something to the fact that Rojas was a converso, i.e., an apostate Jew who either converted or pretended to convert to Christianity as a strategy of survival in period of the Inquisition (Baer 273 et passim). On the other hand, the pattern of events in Celestina ...