Juan Maldonado’s Hispaniola, ‘The Spanish Woman’: A Spanish View on Marriage Choices in the Reformation, trans. and intro. Warren S. Smith and Clark Colahan

The plot of this clever neo-Latin comedy written around the 1520s by Juan Maldonado puts together scheming servants, young maids, conservative parents blinded by greed and social aspiration, a hypocrite friar secretly lusting after a young wife, a wealthy but impotent husband, and a long string of go-betweens and confidantes with their clever parcels of tricks. Against all this social theatre, the young and inexperienced lovers Philocondus and Christiola struggle to overcome family opposition or social prejudice and, most importantly, they also struggle to understand the nature of their own developing feelings, the meaning and implications of those feelings, the value of human freedom and choice, and the responsibility that goes with it...