«Girls Gone Wild». Medieval Spain Edition: A Cognitive, Evolutionary Approach to the Presentation of Female Sexuality in La Celestina

Abstract

This study employs both a cognitive and evolutionary critical lens to demonstrate how Rojas creates within his medieval masterwork a portrayal of women as out of control sexual beings to protest his marginalized status as a converso living in late medieval Spain. As it does so it demonstrates how texts can function as windows into material minds that have long since lost their materiality. The article exploring the ways in which Rojas employs the archetype of the «wandering,» (read sexually out of control) woman to problematize the notion that the upper classes’ blood was unproblematically pure. It then concludes with a demonstration of how in doing so, Rojas provides a discursive forum for the presentation of female sexuality and as a result enables a powerful form of female resistance to power that he himself most likely could not have fully appreciated or understood. But which, luckily, we as 21st century critics, both, can, and should, comprehend and appreciate.