After its first known edition in 1499, La Celestina immediately became an international bestseller. The tragicomic love affair of Calisto and Melibea—brought about by the old bawd Celestina and the squalid underworld over which she presides—conjures up a social landscape dominated by anomie and change. The moral ambiguity that emanates from its realistic dialogues and urban prose style also constitutes one of its most remarkable achievements. The purpose of this edition is to facilitate access to Mabbe’s translation in a modernized text. The introduction provides a succinct account of its Castilian origins and English reception as part of international networks of exchange. These networks included cultural agents engaged in the establishment of vernacular canons through the appropriation of alien literary capital. As they did so, these national traditions also sought to homogenize their respective linguistic communities into a commonwealth of speakers that could be used for the establishment of a comprehensive polity upon a common body of laws and social norms. As a forerunner of the picaresque—which also addresses the language and values that regulate the relations between self and society—The Spanish Bawd exposes the paradoxes of self-interest as the keystone for a life in common.

José María Pérez Fernández is senior lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Translation at the University of Granada