As the Mongol empire settled into ruling huge parts of Eurasia in the second half of the thirteenth century, how did elite individuals outside of the court experience life in the Mongol period? This talk introduces select material from the Wang Family Cemetery in Gansu Province to illuminate the lives of elite women in the Eastern part of the Mongol empire, while also connecting the material remains uncovered in the cemetery to broader pan-Mongol imperial artistic production. Objects from the Wang family tombs reveal the complex identities held by these local elites in the Yuan dynasty, who drew from Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, Mongol, and North Chinese cultural practices. This talk will focus on a handful of the Yuan era tombs that have good evidence for female tomb occupants to demonstrate how object-based analysis can shed light on the lives of women elites in local contexts during the Mongol period.
Eiren Shea (PhD University of Pennsylvania, 2016) is an associate professor of art history at Grinnell College, where she offers classes on the arts of pre-modern Asia. A specialist of the Mongol period, her first book Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange (Routledge, 2020) investigates the role of dress in the Mongol Empire and the impact of Mongol textiles on Asian and European art and society. Shea is currently working on a project on local elites in the Mongol empire, with a special focus on women. With Patricia Blessing and Elizabeth Dospěl Williams, she co-authored Medieval Textiles across Eurasia, c. 300-1500 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) as part of the Cambridge University Press Elements in the Global Middle Ages series. Shea has also published in The Textile Museum Journal, Arts Asiatiques, Journal of Song Yuan Studies, Acta Via Serica, and Ming Studies.
Organised as part of the Research Cluster Courtauld Trans-Asias, led by Professor Sussan Babaie and Professor Stephen Whiteman.
