Spanish · 1465–1541
Rojas was a converso — a Jewish convert's son — from La Puebla de Montalbán, took a law degree at Salamanca, practised in Talavera de la Reina and served as its mayor. In a prefatory letter he claimed he found the first act of the Celestina already written, liked it, and finished the rest in a fortnight's holiday from his studies. Scholars have argued about that claim for five centuries without settling it. He never put his name on the book outright; it appears as an acrostic hidden in the introductory verses, which is the behaviour of a man in a country where the Inquisition had tried his father-in-law. He wrote nothing else that survives. The inventory of his library taken at his death lists law books and a copy of his own work, and his tomb was found in a Talavera convent in the twentieth century.