1. Would your persona have been literate in your chosen culture/time-frame?

a. YESi. Info
a) Women
a. Naturally, there were exceptions. Santa Teresa de Ávila, able to read the letters of St. Jerome (but only in Spanish) before she was out of her teens, was only one among a small group of female authors during the sixteenth century. And, surprisingly enough, around 1500 a number of women -- one was the daughter of Spain's famous classicist, Antonio Nebrija -- taught at the University of Salamanca, although it is not known whether their appointment was the result of Queen Isabel’s influence -- the presence of a female monarch may have raised the overall position of women in Spanish society -- or whether, in the first wave of Renaissance studies in Spain, Latinists were treated with respect regardless of their sex. Spanish girls in the sixteenth century were also allowed to sit in the same classroom as boys, but this practice met with increasing criticism and gradually disappeared.
b. For reference to other educated Spanish women in the sixteenth century, see Guillermo Furlong, La Cultura Femenina en la Epoca Colonial (Buenos Aires, 1951).
i. http://libro.uca.edu/students/students1.htm
b) Literate/ literacy
a. My estimate is slightly above that of Manuel Fernández Alvarez, La Sociedad Española Del Renacimiento (Salamanca, 1970), who claims that only 10 percent of Spain's population in the sixteenth century was literate (p. 193).
i. http://libro.uca.edu/students/students1.htm