Prince Juan and Calisto: Reflections on a Historical Antecedent for a Literary Archetype

Abstract

The present essay contributes to the study of the sources that inspired Fernando de Rojas' creative process by examining Celestina's immediate cultural context of production: Salamanca, 1497-1499. More specifically this article compares the legendary love life and model death of Prince Juan, the firstborn son to the Catholic Kings, who died in Salamanca in 1497 to the erotic passion and bad death of Calisto through the lenses of excess and exemplarity in order to suggest that the prince may have served as a model for Calisto. By bringing together the literary representations of Prince Juan and Calisto, this essay also illuminates the ways in which the literary and didactic functions of excess were negotiated by Rojas to reconcile the apparently contradictory instructions for how to both love well and to die well at the dawn of modernity in Iberia.