Gender in an Early Modern Persian Epistolary Rant

Abstract This article spotlights an undated epistle ascribed to a woman from the Bakhtiari family of Lurs in the vicinity of Isfahan, in southwestern Iran. It found its way to Isfahan as a collector’s item recorded in several late seventeenth-century anthologies. The vernacular language of the letter uses sexual insults to publicize her husband’s infidelity. This rant projects a female voice otherwise excluded from epistolary collections of seventeenth-century Persia.