Chapter 16
John Beusterien
(Texas Tech University, Lubbock)
The Celebratory Conical Hat in La Celestina
Let’s begin by pointing out two apparently unrelated instances of the conical hat:
one as headgear of celebration and one as headgear for the Klan. People wear
brightly colored conical hats for birthday parties and every year people in
Louisiana dress up with large colored conical hats for Courir de Mardi Gras, a
traditional Mardi Gras event held in many Cajun communities of south Louisiana
on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. In contrast to these celebration events, in
the early twentieth century the Ku Klux Klan adopted the white conical hat as part
of its costume. Early versions of the Klan’s use of the conical hat can be first seen
in the film Birth of a Nation. The conical hat’s early function as sign of humiliation provides an explanation
for how it became headgear of the Klan and party headwear. Ever since the Middle
Ages, wearing a large conical hat was a sign of public shame.1 The punished and
the penitent wore the hat in public, marked as sinner or criminal in a show of
public shame. In Spain, it was worn in the parades by brotherhoods (hermandades)
dressed as hooded penitents during Holy Week (parades that still can be seen
today across southern Spain) and, following its function as marker of a
brotherhood, the Ku Klux Klan adopted the Spanish hooded penitent costume.2 1
2
I should mention that, in contrast to the conical hat, authorities also made punished men go
bareheaded (they could not cover their head), another sign of public humiliation in the medieval
period. I would like to thank Rosa A. Perez, another contributor to this volume, for this
information.
For more on the Spanish‐Klan connection, see Donald Robert Beagle and Bryan Albin Giemza,
Poet of the Lost Cause: A Life of Father Ryan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 2008), 169.
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John Beusterien
As a response to the penitent that wore the hat in imitation of public shaming
during Holy Week, the hat was worn in festivity and celebration to open the Lent
season. The world‐upside‐down celebration of carnival radically altered the
conical hat’s meaning as punishment and penitence. In carnival, the sign of the
sinner transformed into the sign of saved, the sign of the outcast transformed into
the sign of inclusion, and the sign of public shame transformed into the sign of a
party. Since the conical hat had meaning as a sign of self‐inflicted punishment
when worn by penitents during the sacred time of Lent—Holy Week and the
remembrance of Christ’s passion and public humiliation—people turned its value
as sign of public shame into that of festive icon in the costume for carnival at the
beginning of Lent. Understanding the history of the conical hat as sign of public shame helps
elucidate how it evolved into a festive hat and, alternatively, the headgear of one
of the most dreadful groups that blot U.S. history. The following essay first
examines how the Spanish use of the conical hat in public punishment was one of
the most significant post‐medieval instances of the conical hat as a sign of public
shame. The Spanish, in fact, kept the practice alive after the medieval period and
were directly and indirectly responsible for its more recent permutations as
headgear in festivities and for the Klan. After examining its history in the Spanish context, this essay takes up the conical
hat as a sign of public shame in La Celestina, a classic late fifteenth‐century work
from Spain about a woman who procures sex for men and who has a brothel with
prostitutes. Essentially I want to argue that the story of the conical hat in La
Celestina reflects the principal character Celestina’s desire to convert the hat into
a sign of celebration. Celestina yearns for the hat not to signify punishment, but
rather female power. The hat for Celestina reflects her nostalgia for a time in which
female friendship, female midwifery, and female authority were not demonized,
but practiced in broad daylight.
One late permutation of the conical hat as sign of punishment was the dunce
cap. The practice of punishing students with a dunce cap did not begin until the
nineteenth century—one of the earliest appearances of the word in English was
chapter 24 of Charles Dicken’s 1840 novel The Old Curiousity Shop.3 But early
manifestations of the dunce cap as sign of public shame, often including ass’s ears,
formed part of the medieval punishment spectacle across Europe. Medieval canon
law often included punishments that consisted of putting people in the pillory
with a cone hat that depicted the wearer’s crime and scenes of damnation. In early
fourteenth‐century France, one source records that the punished individual had
3
See Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (http://dickens.thefreelibrary.com/The‐Old‐Curiosity‐
Shop/1‐24; last accessed 5 March 2012).
The Celebratory Conical Hat in La Celestina
407
to wear a “parchment crown on which the cause of his condemnation was written
in large red letters.”4 Just as it began dying out in Europe as a form a punishment, the tradition of the
cone hat as public punishment spectacle began to flourish in early modern Spain.
The hat would form an essential part of the punishment ceremony instituted by
the Inquisition. The sambenito was a special uniform that served as part of
punishment instituted by the Spanish Inquisition. The sambenito comes from the
combined Spanish words saco bendito or holy sack. In medieval Christian tradition,
the outcast and sinner wore a hair shirt or sack cloth and saco in this Spanish
context indicates that the heretic wore the sack garment that calls attention to his
fallen condition. The saco benito uniform was not complete without the large
conical hat. The robe often had a black cross painted on it and the hat often had
flames, indicating the infernal destination of the heretic. The painted conical hat
left the face exposed because public shaming constituted the crux of the
punishment. Significantly and in contrast to the conical hat’s punishment function,
when the conical hat and saco were adopted by penitent brotherhood groups, the
face was generally covered by a hood, preserving the penitent’s anonymity (the
same Spanish public penitent uniform of conical hat, covered face, and robes with
a cross can be seen in the costume in the Klan figures in The Birth of the Nation). The visual display of the sixteenth‐century sambenito costume in Spain was not
limited to the moment of sentencing of the accused. Initially, the heretic, forced to
wear the long robe traversed by a black cross and a large conical hat, was exposed
to scorn and derision and put on display in the town square, but that costume
would have a life that outlived its wearer. After its immediate utility had passed,
the sambenito was often hung up in the parish church, accompanied by an
inscription intended to humiliate the wearer and family. The display of the
sambenito hung in churches inspired the practice of hanging a cloth in churches
that listed heretical names. The Inquisition released the names of the people that had been tried and wrote
them on a “manta” (a large cloth or “blanket”) in a conspicuous place in the
church. The sambenito also spawned a social craze as manifest in the
dissemination of “green” books that consisted of the names of those tried by the
Inquisition read aloud in parishes. In the popular tradition, some of the green
books were also known as “Stains and Sambenitos of Noble Lineages.”5 The
4
5
Monique Langlois and Yvonne Lanhers, Confessions et jugements de criminels au parlement de Paris
(1319–1350) (Paris: S. E. V. E. N., 1971), 156. I would like to thank Jolanta N. Komorrnicka, another
contributor to this volume, for this reference.
See Francisco de Mendoza y Bobadilla, El tizón de la nobleza española o máculas y sambenitos de sus
linajes (Barcelona: La Selecta, 1880). For more on the tradition of name slandering, green books,
408
John Beusterien
conical hat began as standard Inquisitional punishment in the sixteenth century
and still could be found in early nineteenth century. Goya explores the shaming
punishment of the sambenito on two occasions. In his Inquisitional Tribunal
Questioning Heretics (1812–1819), the accused wear painted hats and one sits on a
platform in front of the audience of the court. In another Goya ink and brush piece
produced in the same period, the heretic penitent covers his face, the locus of
shame, wearing the sambenito gown and conical hat.
Even though the sambenito did not develop into a full‐fledged institutional
punishment practice that slandered family names linked to unorthodox religious
practice until the sixteenth century, sambenito logic already affected and
influenced the author of the La Celestina in the fifteenth century. Fernando de Rojas
had family members tried by the Inquisition. The Inquisition sentenced his father
as a Judaizer in 1488, burning him alive at the stake. Rojas indirectly suggests his
concern with these events when Celestina recalls the history of Claudina.
Celestina’s best friend was Claudina and she often remembers her fondly in the
work. After describing the conical hat punishment of Claudina, Celestina states
“they made her confess to being what she wasn’t,”6 a reference that evokes the
forced and coerced religious conversions occurring when Rojas was writing.7 Despite the suggested connections between the conical hat in La Celestina and the
sambenito headgear, my interest in the La Celestina is not an attempt to link Rojas
to religious heterodoxy. Rather, my primary interest is to perform a close reading
of the text in order to examine Celestina’s depiction of the conical hat.8 Women
transferred the meaning of the conical hat in the fifteenth century into their own
6
7
8
the “manta,” and sambenitos, see John Beusterien, “Blotted Genealogies: A Survey of the libros
verdes,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (2001): 183–97.
Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina: Comedia o tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. Peter Russell
(Madrid: Castalia, 1991), 369: “la hizieron aquella vez confessar lo que no era.” English
translations are from Peter Bush, trans., Fernando de Rojas, Celestina, intro. Juan Goytisolo (New
York: Penguin, 2010), 82. Stephen Gilman has interpreted this quote by suggesting that Claudina has been punished by the
Inquisition. See The Spain of Fernando de Rojas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). Peter
Russel, in turn, points out that Gilman’s conclusion may be unfounded since the Inquisition still
had not taken over the jurisdiction in such matters. See Peter Russell, Temas de La Celestina y otros
estudios: Del Cid al Quijote (Barcelona: Ariel, 1978), 367.
The interest in the hat itself in this chapter follows on the work of Hispanists of the early modern
period that seeks to examine costume history and material culture. For further reading on
different approaches to these two critical inquiries, see: Barbara Fuchs, Exotic Nation: Maurophilia
and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2009);
Enrique García Santo‐Tomás, Modernidad bajo sospecha: Salas Barbadillo y la cultura material del siglo
XVII (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2008); and Laura Bass, The Drama
of the Portrait: Theater and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain (University Park: Penn State
University Press, 2008). The Celebratory Conical Hat in La Celestina
409
fashion item. This conical hat, known as the henin, also included a hanging veil.9
In Celestina’s case, as the title of this chapter suggests, Celestina does not make the
conical hat a sign of fashion, but invests a unique pride in the hat and, I will argue
in what follows, she celebrates it as an icon of women’s power and her friendship
with Claudina.10 The conical hat was a shaming punishment reserved for the social outcast, but,
in the context of the plot of La Celestina, the hat is specifically a punishment for
witch practice. Celestina tells the servant Pármeno that
(t)he first time they accused (Claudina) of being a witch because they’d caught her at
night collecting earth by a crossroads by candlelight, and they put her in the stocks to
be pilloried in the town square for half a day, with a painted cone on her head.11 Rojas wrote at a time when, fueled by publications like the witch‐hunting guide
Malleus Malificarum (1484), religious and political institutions across Europe were
stepping up their persecution of witches. In Spain, civil law code demanded that
a witch be sentenced to death by fire. Religious law (that is, the canonical law out
of which many Inquisition punishments would develop) classified two types of
witches. The bruja worshipped the devil and was often charged with fornicating
with him while the hechicera did not worship the devil, but held certain powers
over him.12 The first scholar to comment on the La Celestina, an anonymous sixteenth‐
century Spanish churchman, notes that the reference to the conical hat in La
Celestina is an example of a witch punishment as described in canonical law. The
anonymous churchman writes that the punishment of Claudina and the conical
hat scene in La Celestina are an example in which the witch is placed on a platform
in public spectacle and is “mitered.”13 Antonio de Nebrija, writing at the time of
the publication of La Celestina, further glosses the notion of “mitering” by writing
9
10
11
12
13
Hilda Amphlett, Hats: A History of Fashion in Headwear (London: Richard Sadler Ltd., 1974), 55–56.
This study examines Celestina’s personal view of Claudina and not the rhetorical strategies
employed in her description of Claudina. Joseph Snow has focused on how Celestina’s memory
of Claudina forms part of rhetorical strategy that is designed to manipulate and to win over
Pármeno’s favor. Snow argues that the memory of his mother Claudina only angers Pármeno
since the story makes him aware of his ignoble heritage. The Claudina story ultimately backfires
on Celestina since Pármeno stabs Celestina out of rage and humiliation. See “Celestina’s
Claudina,” Hispanic Studies in Honor of Alan D. Deyermond: A North American Tribute, ed. John S.
Miletich (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1986), 257–77. Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina, 367: “Y aun la una le levantaron que era bruxa, porque la hallaron
de noche con unas candelillas, cogendo tierra de una encruzijada, y la tovieron medio día en una
escalera en la plaça, puesto uno como rocadero pintado en la cabeça.” English translation Bush,
Celestina, 82 (see note 6).
See Russell, Temas de La Celestina, 330 (see note 7).
Celestina comentada, ed. Louise Fothergill‐Payne, Enrique Fernández Rivera, Peter Fothergill‐Payne
(Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 2002).
410
John Beusterien
that the conical hat is also called a mitra sclerata a terminology that translates as
“cursed” or “damning” miter.14 Painting infernal images on the damning miter (both in the punishment of witches
and other religious heretics such as conversos) contrasted with the religious practice
of painting holy images on the religious miter. Parishioners began to see their
highest religious figures wearing a cone hat with the institutionalization of the
miter as headgear in the thirteenth century. In medieval Christianity, while the
crown signaled the head of the sovereign ruler, a long, often conical, hat signaled
religious authority. The pope or bishop wore a miter, an elaborate headdress often
painted with images of sacred scenes.
Headgear that served as emblem of salvation took on more majestic significance
in Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. The painted miter, amplifying the
human head as a vehicle for the observer to comprehend heaven and make its
wearer an exemplary celestial figure, became especially magnificent at the
beginning of Spain’s tenure as world power. In The Burial of Count Orgaz
(1586–1588), one of El Greco’s most famous works, Saint Augustine has come
down from heaven to assist in the burial of Count of Orgaz, wearing an
embroidered garment with images and a magnificent gold miter. The El Greco miter is only a represented image, but many real early Spanish
miters still exist, such as the famed sixteenth‐century Escorial miter. The Escorial
miter contains a Mexican feather mosaic arranged to resemble a stained glass
window. Its textile support portrays multiple iconographic images, including:
Christ’s Redemption of Humanity; episodes of Christ’s Passion; the Crucifixion;
the Resurrection; the Ascension of Christ; the Last Judgment; the Assumption and
Coronation of the Virgin Mary; and the Holy Trinity. Aside from these images,
more than two hundred human faces are represented in the multicolored
composition on the miter.15 The Escorial miter on the head of the sacred authoritative figure and its images
served as a vehicle directing the religious observer toward the heavenly realm. In
contrast, the painted cursed miter became a sign of its wearer’s infernal connection
just as the sacred painted miter signaled its wearer’s celestial connection.
Specifically, in La Celestina, the mitra sclerata would not have portrayed images of
sacred scenes and the road to heaven, but a description of Claudina’s sins as witch
and images that conjured hell. John Mabbe’s 1631 English translation of the
14
15
See the entry “coroza,” in Lidio Nieto Jiménez and Manuel Alvar Ezquerra, ed., Nuevo tesoro
lexicográfico del español (s. XIV – 1726), vol. 4. (Madrid: Arco Libros, 2007), 2968.
Teresa Ortiz Salazar, “The Feather Adarga of Phillip II and the Escorial Miter,” Nuevo mundo,
mundos nuevos (1–25–2006; http://nuevomundo.revues.org/pdf/1468; last accessed on March 5,
2012).
The Celebratory Conical Hat in La Celestina
411
Claudina passage highlights the conical hat’s role as head ornament that contains
damning text and image. Mabbe describes the cone hat as “a high paper Hat
painted full of Divels, whereon her fault was written.”16 Faulting not only Claudina, but also Celestina, the first sixteenth‐century scholar
to write about La Celestina begins a long moralizing critical tradition that
understands La Celestina as witch worthy of contempt. Indeed, that scholar argues
that her name is a borrowing of scelus, the same Latin root word that gives sclerata.
This paper, however, diverges from the critical tradition that understands
Celestina as part of the “bad witch” tradition, that is, that envisions as her morally
retrograde.17 Instead, it conceives La Celestina in general and the conical hat
specifically within the context of a “good witch” tradition, that is, a tradition in
which the word “Celestina” does not point to the Latin word meaning “damned,”
but rather a Latin word that connects her to the stars or the celestial. Celestina remembers the time that her beloved friend Claudina had once worn
the cone hat with pride. Celestina reminisces about the fact that her friend
Claudina wore the hat in broad daylight in front of onlookers and did not feel
shame. Celestina, in a posthumous panegyric for Claudina, recalls the Claudina
episode: She didn’t mind . . . . She always got it right, I swear to God and my conscience. Even
when she was in that pillory, her looks and gestures showed she couldn’t care less
about the people looking up at her.18 Indeed, Celestina points out that Claudina, subjected to public scorn in the cone
hat, in no way should lose her reputation just as Virgil should not either. Celestina
concludes: I suppose you’ve heard about that clever Virgil. They put him in a basket and hung
him from a tower with all Rome watching. It didn’t mean he was no longer respected
or that the good name of Virgil was soiled.19
16
17
18
19
James Mabbe, Celestina or The Tragicke‐Comedy of Calisto and Melibea, Intro.James Fitzmaurice‐
Kelley, The Tudor Translations, ed. W. E. Henley, vol. 6. (London: David Nutt, 1894), 132.
One example of the critical “bad witch” tradition can be found in Jean Dangler’s argument that
Rojas deprecates Celestina so as to dissuade readers from seeking the service of women. Dangler
writes: “Rojas’s attack is particularly directed toward women healers, whose legitimate medieval
status increasingly eroded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the professionalization of
medicine” (Jean Dangler, Making Difference in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia [Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2005], 111).
Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina, 367: “Y mira en qué tan poco lo tuvo con su buen seso ... En todo
tenía gracia; que en Dios y en mi conciencia, aun en aquella escalera estava y parecía que a todos
los de baxo no tenía en una blanca, según su meneo y presencia.” English translation Bush,
Celestina, 82 (see note 6).
Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina, 368: “Verás quién fue Virgilio y qué tanto supo; mas ya havrás
oýdo cómo estovo en un cesto colgado de una torre, mirándole toda Roma. Pero por eso no dexó
412
John Beusterien
Claudina is Celestina’s Virgil. Virgil was not just the premier poetic model
(particularly his use of the epic) for the medieval mind, but also one of the period’s
most important historical authorities. Claudina, can, like the court jester or the
clown, wear the hat in an imitation of masculine authority. But she does not only
wear the hat in a carnival act that simply mocks authority. Claudina is an authority
for Celestina like Virgil is to the male establishment. In Celestina’s mind, Claudina
wears the crown of a sage authority. As critics have commented, Rojas was interested in the medieval notion of Lady
Fortune when he constructed the plot of La Celestina.20 The two lovers in the story,
after being at the “top,” quite literally fall to their deaths: Calisto from a wall and
Melibea from a tower. The medieval allegory of Fortune is connected with the
semiotics of the conical hat. The tip of the hat pointing upward suggests the top
of Fortune’s wheel and when fallen and pointing downward it suggests the bottom
of the wheel. One may think of a jester’s hat with the tip pointing downward.
Fortune was connected with knowing what is in the stars and the conical hat
signaled the one that was able to read the stars. With its circular base and point
reaching up to the heavens, the conical hat evokes the mind of the wise sage
familiar with the stars. The meaning of the hat in Celestina’s mind is meant to cast aside the sign of
shame and to evoke a cone of power, like the conical crown of Egyptian pharaohs
that denoted the kingʹs union with the Sky‐goddess or the Roman apex that was
sometimes described as a conical hat worn by a priesthood of women. Celestina
reminisces when she met Claudina at night with other women and formed a circle
with a candle in the middle to practice their arts. The early Spanish meaning of the
word cerco (from Latin circus) had a specific meaning in a military context,
referring to a group of male soldiers that formed a circular formation in the siege
of a city.21 Rojas uses the character of the Celestina to use the word cerco, not to
mean a group of men forming a circle of military might, but to refer to a group of
women forming a different sort of circle of power. Celestina’s use of the word cerco to describe her time in the circle with Claudina
is not only one of her fondest memories of Claudina, but also, I would argue,
contributes to more fully understanding the logic for the shape of the conical hat
20
21
de ser honrrado ni perdió el nombre de Virgilio.” English translation Bush, Celestina, 82 (see note
6).
Stephen Gilman makes one of the most extensive analyses of Fortune’s Wheel at work in the Art
of La Celestina (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956), here 125. See the entry “cerco” in Nieto Jiménez and Alvar Ezquerra, ed., Nuevo tesoro lexicográfico, 2382 (see
note 14).
The Celebratory Conical Hat in La Celestina
413
as Celestina envisions it on Claudina’s head. The shape of the traditional witch
cerco is a shape in which women form a circle and envision their placement in that
circle as part of a larger cone in which the center of their circle does not correspond
to the two dimensional center of the circle, but to the top of a cone that reaches into
the heavens. Indeed, the imagined cone shape of the female cerco connects to the
cone shape of the hat as well as the energy from which the witch gathers her
energy: the cone of power. Much later, Goya will offer one good visual example
of the divergent and converging meanings of the cone. In Witches in the Air
(1797–1798), a group of witches wear painted cone hats. The women are also
arranged in a circle, but have conjured their power in a successful act of levitation:
the three cone‐headed witches are levitating in the air. The grouped bodies of the
witches form the shape of a flying cone. The Claudina story represents a moment of Celestina´s nostalgia. Her nostalgia
enfolds a time in which she and Claudina held special power in their community
and were not scorned as “bad witches.” Everyone knew both of them and greeted
them on the street. When Celestina remembers Claudina, she yearns for a moment
of female agency condemned by male authorities. Even as male practitioners
increasingly took over the work of childbirth, Claudina practiced midwifery,
having helped deliver countless children in the community: “When we were in the
street, everyone she bumped into she’d brought into this world.”22 Celestina and
Claudina were also curanderas since they were familiar with curative herbs and
other medicinal practice. They procured sexual partners for the men in the town.
Finally, they had a close and special friendship. They went out to drink wine
together. Celestina says that she and Claudina did everything together and that “in
this life I never had a greater friend, companion or comfort in my travails.”23 In a
powerful elegy to her friend she states: “Who shared my secrets? Who could I tell
my cares to?”24 The plot of La Celestina ultimately celebrates female sexuality, female community
and female justice. Even though Claudina has died, Celestina continues to have
close relationships with women. Areúsa is another important female character in
the work. She practices prostitution secretly and is thereby in a dangerous social
position since she could be denounced by her neighbors and punished.
Nonetheless, she is an example of an independent woman and in one scene
22
23
24
Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina, 366: “Si salíamos por la calle, quantos topávamos eran sus
ahijados.” English translation Bush, Celestina, 81 (see note 6).
Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina, 364: “y tuve yo en este mundo otra tal amiga, otra tal compañera,
tal aliviadora de mis trabajos y fatigas.” English translation Bush, Celestina, 80 (see note 6).
Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina, 364:“¿quién sabía mis secretos, a quién descobría mi coraçón?”
English translation, Peter Bush, Celestina, 80 (see note 6).
414
John Beusterien
Celestina and Areúsa overtly flirt and fondle each other.25 Moreover, the character
of Areúsa forms part of a female microsociety that exercises justice in constrast to
the examples of a failed male justice system in the work.26 In La Celestina, the
justice system’s male representatives, the judge and the constable, do not serve
their purpose and flounder in failure. The judge who sentences Pármeno and Sempronio for the death of Celestina is
corrupt (he is a personal crony of Calisto’s family), the constable arrives too late
to save Celestina, and the servants jump from the window thwarting the legal
system in acting against their crime (since they are already near dead before the
“execution”). Even the punishment of the conical hat, at least for Celestina, fails
as an instrument of justice on Claudina’s head. In turn, the women effectively carry out justice, albeit not necessarily as planned. Areúsa has used her influence as prostitute to free her client Centurio, a scoundrel
soldier, three times from punishment. Aside from influencing the authorities to
release Centurio, Areúsa also takes justice in her own hands by seeking revenge
for the deaths of Pármeno and Sempronio. Areúsa employs Centurio to kill Calisto
in order to avenge the death of her lover, Pármeno. Although Centurio fails on his
mission, he does get Traso to create a scuffle that leads to Calisto’s death and,
although not carried out as she expected, Areúsa’s revenge plot and justice bring
about the desired end. Areúsa therefore construes her own version of justice in
parallel to Celestina who also construes her own meaning of justice when she
rejects the meaning to the conical hat as it serves the needs of the male justice
system.
Celestina reconstrues the meaning of the conical hat, converting it from an object
of the male justice system that punishes the female into a sign of woman’s pride.
Like Celestina, who inverts the meaning of the hat as sign of humiliation, the
carnival costume can also turn meaning. In a rural community in Galicia, Spain,
carnival goers sometimes combine signs of medieval public shame in the same
costume. It is not uncommon to find a carnival costume that not only consists of
the decorated conical hat, but also feathers. In the medieval and early modern
period in Spain, female pimps (alcahuetas) were animalized and shamed through
the practice of feathering: Celestina supposedly was feathered on three occasions.27
25
26
27
See Sherry M. Velasco, Lesbians in Early Modern Spain (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press,
2011), and Mary S. Gossy, Empire on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2009).
For more on the Celestina’s female microsociety, see Alan Deyermond, “Female Societies in
Celestina,” Fernando de Rojas and Celestina: Approaching the Fifth Centenary, ed. Ivy A. Corfis and
Joseph T. Snow (Madison, WI: The Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1993), 1–32. Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina, 274: “. . . y lo que más de ello siento es venir a manos de aquella
trotaconventos, después de tres veces emplumada” (see note 6). According to one early source,
The Celebratory Conical Hat in La Celestina
415
The story of the Claudina conical hat, however, is not a mocking of authority by
putting on a temporary costume in carnival. For Celestina, the conical hat on Claudina is an instance of female pride and
Celestina’s celebration of the conical hat rejects the male‐dominated religious and
political institutions that marginalized expressions of female power. The conical
hat is not a shaming punishment imposed by the emerging male‐dominated state
apparatus, but a hat with its own power symbolics, including female authority in
medical practice, midwifery, non‐sanctioned female religious practice, and female
sexual agency, including prostitution, lesbian desire and freedom for a woman
who procured sex for others.
the feathering punishment is reserved for alcahuetas and it consisted of stripping the upper half
of the woman’s body, spreading it with honey and then sticking little feathers to the torso.
Sebastián de Covarrubias writes in the Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española: “A las alcahuetas
acostumbran desnudarlas del medio cuerpo arriba y, untadas con miel, las siebran de plumas
menudas, que parecen monstruos, medio aves medio mugeres” (ed. Martín de Riquer [Barcelona:
S. A. Horta, 1943], 508).