One divan for all the women

Claim (verbatim)

The women poets of the Persian tradition are attested across the tazkiras and histories - Rabi'a Balkhi (Rabi'a bint Ka'b al-Quzdari, tenth century), Mahsati Ganjavi (twelfth century, mistress of the ribald quatrain), Padishah Khatun and Jahan Malik Khatun (thirteenth-fourteenth centuries), and a scatter of others named for a single famous verse. But attestation and survival are almost unrelated for them, and the surviving record is not merely thin, it is extraordinarily concentrated. The mechanism doubles the ordinary filter: women's verse was less likely to be gathered into a formal divan in the first place, and what was gathered depended, like all court poetry, on continued copying that a change of dynasty ended. The result is that the entire surviving corpus of named Persian women poets rests on a single accident of preservation - one princess whose divan happened to be collected and to reach a modern editor - while every other name is reduced to a handful of quoted lines or an attribution too contested to trust (Mahsati's quatrains are themselves a wandering cloud; Rabi'a's authenticity is debated). Prediction restated: one woman's divan holds the majority of all verse attributed to named women on Ganjoor, and only a tiny handful of women poets clear even a modest line-count - the female half of the tradition survives as one book and a drift of fragments.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: on Ganjoor, the single largest corpus attributed to a named woman poet will account for over half of all bayts attributed to named women poets combined, and fewer than five named women poets will hold more than 50 bayts each (primary clause: one woman's corpus exceeding half the women-attributed total; the verdict follows it). The set is the named women poets identifiable in the classical tazkiras and in Safa; the count is over attributed Ganjoor poem-text; contested attributions are reported but still counted; and the test voids if fewer than eight named women poets can be located on Ganjoor at all.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Ganjoor (ganjoor.net) author roster - identify the named women poets (cross-checked against the tazkira and Safa attestations), sum each one's bayts, and compute the largest single share and the count exceeding 50 bayts.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The landscape is described in print: Jahan Malik Khatun's divan - edited Tehran 1995 - is presented by Davis as the only substantial surviving corpus by a premodern Persian woman, Meier's Die schone Mahsati assembles the next-largest (and notoriously wandering) corpus, and the remaining named women survive as quoted fragments. But the over-half single-corpus share of all women-attributed bayts on Ganjoor, and the fewer-than-five-over-50-bayts count, are un-run aggregate arithmetic over a roster nobody has summed; the qualitative largest-single statements do not fix the combined-total fractions.

• Divan-i Jahan Malik Khatun, ed. P. Kashani-Rad and K. Ahmadnizhad (Tehran, 1374sh/1995)
• D. Davis (trans.), Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz (Washington DC, 2012), on Jahan Malik Khatun's divan as the great exception among premodern Persian women poets
• F. Meier, Die schone Mahsati: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des persischen Vierzeilers (Wiesbaden, 1963)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.