The theme of the dissertation is the important piece of 16th century Spanish prose, Retrato de la Lozana andaluza (Portrait of Lozana: The Lusty Andalusian Woman) by Francisco Delicado. Published anonymously in Venice around the year 1530, it fell into obscurity for the next three hundred years. The only known copy was discovered in the middle of the 19th century in Vienna. Over the next hundred and fifty years this literary curiosity gradually became recognized as an integral part of the Spanish literary canon. Still, the research of La Lozano andaluza continues to feature blank spaces and unresolved issues, and is at the same time characterized by its conflicting nature and the absence of a generally accepted consensus. The introduction of the thesis summarizes and evaluates the state and condition of present-day research and outlines the general problems of the literary canon and its exploration through the concept of a philological field. The aim of the first part of the thesis is to present all verified editing data and to focus on those aspects of the work that have been neglected. These include the typography and iconography of the original publication, the narrative structure and the overview and nature of the general meaning-making principles. Delicado's peculiar use of language, his...

The literary depiction of prostitutes and courtesans in early modern Spanish and Italian literature (15th-17th centuries) generally follows the misogynistic and patriarchal norms characteristic of the period. Female characters associated with sexual commerce (including go-betweens and procuresses) are presented negatively and tend to meet forms of punishment (death, public humiliation) in line with the moralizing parameters in which they operate. The dissertation centers on three works—the anonymous Carajicomedia (1519), Francisco Delicado’s Retrato de la Lozana andaluza (1524), and Pietro Aretino’s Le sei giornate (1536)—that go against the dominant moralizing representation of female sexual workers, even to the point of celebrating their mode of existence and behavior rather than condemning it. Male characters, in turn, are often presented in a disparaging light, challenging readers’ patriarchal expectations. The dissertation seeks to explain these anomalous works through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theoretical approach to François Rabelais’s Gargantua et Pantagruel (composed in the same period) whose fundamental characteristics closely conform to the popular-festive environment and practices of Carnival and related phenomena. The “logic” of Carnival is based on systematic transgression, on forms of symbolic inversion (the “world-upside-down”), and the celebration of the human body and its pleasures in a way that breaks the norms of an “official culture” as established by the Church and State. The dissertation strives to place the three works studied in the same unique sociohistorical context that enabled the genesis not only of Rabelais’s works, but several by Erasmus, Cervantes, and Shakespeare: all writers—according to Bakhtin—that activated the worldview of the popular-festive culture that surrounded them. The subsequent ambivalent, if not overtly negative, reception of the three works at the center of the dissertation is largely due to the inability of scholars from later periods to comprehend the precise sociocultural dynamics in play in their production—a fate similar to that suffered by Rabelais’s masterful Gargantua et Pantagruel. / 2026-10-01T00:00:00Z