Actas del Simposio Internacional 1502-2002: Five Hundred Years of Fernando de Rojas' Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (review)

These actas address bibliographical, textual, and interpretative dimensions of the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, the form in which we mostly experience Rojas's text, as Juan Carlos Conde notes in his introduction. The articles in this anthology are grouped in four sections: "De re bibliographica"; "De cuestiones textuales"; "De análisis e interpretación literarios"; and "De recepción: lecturas y lectores de la Tragicomedia". The span of time between presentation of papers at the conference itself (October 2002) and publication of the proceedings (2007), as Conde mentions, allowed for extending the scholarship and for reflecting on the spate of commemorative congresses and their proceedings dedicated to the various Celestinesque dates that could be taken as anniversaries: 1997, 1999, 2002. This deliberation and expansion of the materials published here indeed make the Actas an essential reference work for Celestinistas, particularly since it presents a synthesis of recent work on the textual tradition and of the chronology of both the Comedia and the Tragicomedia.

The first section, "De re bibliographica", contains Victor Infantes's "El laberinto cronológico y editorial de las primitivas impresiones de Celestina (1497-1514), con una marginalia bibliográfica al cabo", which provides a basic (if idiosyncratic) foundation for understanding the relationships among the various editions. Infantes's synthesis is particularly refreshing in that he takes as his basis for analysis not just textual criticism, but bibliographical analysis of the surviving codices from the commercial and practical viewpoint of a printer-publisher. He accompanies this with an extended discussion of the Hispanic Society of America's incunable, discussing the provenance of existing copies, and sources in the literature of imaginary, hypothetical, unknown and not located copies. In the following table (adapted from the "Tipología editorial de las impresiones españolas . . . [e] italianas") of known and located copies, I summarize the details of Infantes's analysis but express the collation in the Greg/ Bowers form, and caution readers that, to understand Infantes's reasoning and the evidence that led to these conclusions, it is necessary to read his essay and the supporting "Marginalia bibliográfica". While useful for his argument, his radical distinction between readers and purchasers of books is perhaps overstated, and his complaint that bibliographical research is seldom reflected in literary analysis is, alas, not accompanied by any indication of what such changes might look like.

Table 1.

Chronological Listing of Editions of Celestina

Infantes's discussion begins by showing that Burgos: Fadrique Biel de Basilea, 1499? is not an incunabulum and not the princeps of the Comedia. Rather, it is an edition with illustrations (and thus in all likelihood dates from 1501-1502), to which a false colophon and shield were added as it passed through the hands of dealers and collectors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After the essay portion of his chapter, he catalogs and comments on each of the editions in chronological order according to previous wisdom, imagination, or stated imprint, which he then reorganizes in the "Tipología" by his asserted date, but only for editions with existing copies. In order to excite the curiosity of readers and to supply a basic outline for estudiosos, I have combined the data from his catalog with his typology in Table 1.

There remain, however, the editions that Infantes calls imaginary (often based on errors of one kind or another), hypothetical (links in the textual stemma of various editors and critics), or unknown and not located (credibly mentioned or logically asserted but with no present testimony or location). The two posited princeps editions are underlined in Table 2; however, without copies of either ever located or mentioned, one might wonder what...