This article investigates how women’s relative absence from medieval textual archives can be reconsidered through the study of visual and material culture. Focusing on Mongol and Yuan China and read in relation to The Travels of Marco Polo, it argues that women’s artistic production functioned as a form of embedded counter-archive that preserves traces of participation obscured in narrative sources. Drawing on Black feminist epistemology as a heuristic framework and employing critical fabulation and poetic inquiry as analytical methods, the study interprets silence as a meaningful historical trace rather than a void, and considers silence not as absence but as a structured condition of archival production. Four case studies—Guan Daosheng’s literati bamboo painting, the handscroll tradition associated with Lady Su Hui, imperial phoenix embroidery, and Silk Road textile fragments—demonstrate distinct modes through which women’s presence becomes materially legible: mediated visibility, formal containment, infrastructural anonymity, and circulatory displacement. These “quiet arts” reveal how women’s labour and creativity persisted within and alongside patriarchal inscriptional systems even when textual attribution receded. In dialogue with the shadow silhouettes of contemporary artist Kara Walker, the article further situates these premodern archives within a broader visual language of absence and recovery. Rather than reconstructing lost biographies, it proposes a transdisciplinary method—integrating art history, feminist theory, theology, and poetic inquiry—for reading material culture as a site where historical silence becomes structurally legible. It proposes a transdisciplinary approach that expands art historical methods for interpreting gender, authorship, and archival silence in medieval visual culture.
Tinka Harvard (Sun,) studied this question.