Eiren Shea
Synopsis:
This talk discusses Mongol women’s court dress, the formal attire worn by elite Mongol women across the Empire in the 13th and 14th centuries. It focuses in particular on the form of the tall hat worn by elite married women, the boqta, and the wide court robe. Through a close look at excavated examples of dress alongside pictorial representations of courtly women, we reach an understanding of what Mongol women wore in a courtly context. The public-facing role of elite Mongol women made their dress widely recognizable and imbued it with cultural and political significance that continued even after the collapse of the Mongol empire in the mid-14th century.
Worksheet:
A worksheet for this video is available here.
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References:
Allsen, Thomas. The Steppe and the Sea: Pearls in the Mongol Empire. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 
Broadbridge, Anne. Women and the Making of the Mongol Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Chida-Razvi, Mehreen. “Power and Politics of Representation: Picturing Elite Women in Ilkhanid Painting,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3 (2020): 1–30.
De Nicola, Bruno. Women in Mongol Iran: The Khatuns, 1206–1335. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
Kadoi, Yuka. “The Mongols Enthroned.” In The Diez Albums: Contexts and Contents, edited by Julia Gonnella, Friederike Weis, and Christoph Rauch. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017.
Natif, Mika. “Hamida Banu’s New Headgear and Royal Female Identities at the Court of Emperor Akbar in Mughal India.” Presentation, Institute for Middle East Studies (IMES) Annual Conference, George Washington University, Washington, DC, April 8, 2022.
Shea, Eiren. Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange. London: Routledge, 2020.
Shea, Eiren. “Painted Silks: Form and Production of Women’s Court Dress in the Mongol Empire,” The Textile Museum Journal 45 (2018): 36–55.
Citation:
Eiren Shea, “Mongol Women’s Court Dress,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 14 March 2024.
Eiren Shea (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2016) is Associate Professor of Art History at Grinnell College, where she offers classes on the arts of pre-modern Asia. She is the author of Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange (Routledge, 2020). With Patricia Blessing and Elizabeth Dospěl Williams, she also co-authored Medieval Textiles across Eurasia, c. 300-1400 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Her work has been supported by the Chiang Ching Kuo Foundation, Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, The Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies, and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts (CASVA).