This dissertation examines the profeminist position of Francisco Delicado in Retrato de la Lozana andaluza. In Renaissance European society the patriarchal culture promoted notions of women's inferiority and urged a life of domestic confinement and restriction from discursive participation in the social and public dimension as ideal for female respectability. Delicado makes a statement in favor of greater possibilities for women by proposing a female character, Lozana, who is free, independent, intellectually competitive and extremely verbal. His discourse resists Renaissance cultural prescriptions for women dealing with enclosure, silence and chastity, values that many European moralists and philosophers exhorted in various treatises and manuals about women's education With a grounding in the current theoretical understanding of Renaissance feminism, this dissertation presents an examination of Delicado's profeminist position in the context of what are currently described as individualist and relational models. The individualist model proposes an autonomy of women in relation to men, law and politics, while the relational explores what women are and do in contrast to men. Delicado's text offers the possibility of invoking both models simultaneously. La Lozana displays in public her capacities to undertake activities and behaviors traditionally accepted as specific to men, thereby enacting her individualist stance. At the same time, however, she evinces a reliance on the relational model through using her knowledge of food and gastronomy as a way to gain control and power. Food and eroticism are interwoven in the text with feminist issues in the sense that sensual components are recognized as pleasures to be fully enjoyed as well as the basis of women's exercise of power