The title of the earliest editions of this book, The Comedy or Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea, referred to two young lovers, but very soon it was replaced by La Celestina, which is the name of an old witch who gives Melibea a magic potion that makes her fall in love with Calisto. The enigmas of the text do not end there. Its author, Fernando de Rojas, a scholar of Jewish descent, declared that he was continuing an incomplete, anonymous work, and this appears to be true. Indeed, all this mystery contributes to the profound impression made by the piece, which was read with passion and treated as common property. The work has a theatrical arrangement designed to be read aloud (in public and in private), but not to be performed: it is what is known as a humanistic comedy. But the freedom and frankness of its dialogs, the psychological penetration of its many characters, the variety of its moods (from the educated and sophisticated to the very coarse), meant that this masterpiece influenced the emerging novel form much more than it did the theatre. Although it is proclaimed as a moral work, about illicit love and its punishments, as well as the evils of witchcraft and ambition, the book reveals a bitter perception of human nature and, often, a profound nihilism. Cervantes, who read it closely, accurately summed it up in a famous couplet with the last syllables missing: “A book of divine truth, if more of the human was hidden.” JCM