SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Mahsati Ganjavi was a pioneer of the Persian quatrain (rubaʿi) who flourished in the eleventh or, as is more likely, the twelfth century CE. Her surname suggests she hailed from the city of Ganja, in modern-day Azerbaijan. After her fourteenth-century counterpart, Jahan Malik Khatun, she stands out, perhaps, as the second-most prolific Persian woman poet of the global Middle Ages.