A penetrable text? Illustration and transgression in the 1499(?) edition of Celestina
2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/02666286.2005.10462097
ISSN1943-2178
Autores Tópico(s)Medieval Iberian Studies
ResumoAbstract These are the words of the aged procuress, Celestina, who flaunts her monopoly over the virgins of the town and her mastery in the art of restoring them by mending their torn maidenheads. By means of her systematic accounting and ledger book, Celestina keeps careful tabs on and controls the supply and demand of virginity in the local economy. She is both the despoiler and fabricator of virgins in the city she inhabits. Celestina boasts of her craft using the expression correr hilado (trading spun thread), a euphemism that in Spanish still carries not only the strict sense of sewing but also the connotation of deflowering through the metaphorical association of penetrating cloth and other membranes with a needle. In this sense, Manuel da Costa Fontes has noticed the widespread dissemination of the word hilar and the imagery of sewing (pins, needles, stitches), related to sex and prostitution during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spanish and Portuguese folk tradition. The thread that Celestina trades was a euphemism for semen and the madejas or balls around which this yam is rolled operate as dysphemic terms for testicles. Beyond the demonstrable sexual implications of the stitching metaphor, however, the trope may also be applied to the complex synergism established between word and image in this text, whose popular name derives from its unforgettable bawdy protagonist.
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