Hafiz of Shiraz has long been celebrated by many as the greatest Persian poet within the annals of world literature. During the fourteenth century he was master of the Persian 'ghazal'--the pre-eminent genre of love poetry in the Iranian world in its day and which, in the hands of Hafiz, reached the pinnacle of its development and refinement. Dominic Brookshaw here places Hafiz into a broader literary context by comparing his poetry with his two most important contemporaries: 'Ubayd-i Zakani and the poet-princess, Jahan-Malik Khatun, whose 'ghazals' have received insufficient scholarly...