Across Eurasia’s Middle Ages: “Women’s Weaving” Motif in Daoism and Christianity

Abstract

This article undertakes a cross-cultural comparative inquiry into the motif of “women’s weaving” in medieval Daoism and Christianity. Although the two traditions developed with minimal historical contact, both elevate women’s textile labor into a central metaphor for cosmogenesis, sacred order, and individual salvation. Nevertheless, their hermeneutic trajectories diverge in essential ways. Working within a tripartite analytical framework (intellectual roots, artistic images, ritual practices) to argue that Daoism interprets “women’s weaving” as a proactive technique of transformation and nurture, based on a cosmology of immanent huasheng lun. In this reading, the image is affiliated with the cosmic creativity of nüxian, the inner transformation of their body, and the autonomous pursuit of transcendence. By contrast, within Christianity’s transcendent theological horizon of creatio ex nihilo, “women’s weaving” is configured primarily as an ethical discipline of responsive obedience, closely tied to the mystery of the Incarnation, the imitatio Dei, and communal spiritual exercises and charity under monasticism. The cross-cultural resonance of this motif, I contend, is grounded in the “men’s ploughing and women’s weaving” economic formation, patriarchal gender order, and shared symbolic cognition; its decisive bifurcation arises from contrasting deep cultural structures—namely, cosmology, conceptions of the body, soteriology, and church–state arrangements. Through this micro-case, the article further argues that the sacralization of secular gender roles constitutes an agentic cultural choice, one that indexes distinct civilizational pathways in understanding creation, nature, the body, and freedom.

1. Introduction

In the study of religion, metaphor has long functioned as a key mediator between the empirical world and the transcendent. Among images drawn from everyday productive life, a few possess the capacity to traverse geographical and cultural distance and thereby disclose shared structures of religious cognition (for a contemporary reflection on fabric-like networks and “material intelligence,” see Tripaldi and de Giuli 2022). Weaving—as one of humanity’s oldest techniques—constitutes such an archetypal image. Recent material-culture scholarship shows that across Eurasia, ca. 300–1400 CE—from East Asia (China, Japan) to the Mediterranean worlds of Byzantium and Islam—textile production was typically women’s work, a foundational form of gendered labor (Blessing et al. 2023, p. 18). Across major religious traditions, it accrued dense associations with creation, order, fate, transformation, and salvation. Taking women’s weaving as a micro-analytical entry point, this study conducts a systematic comparison of medieval Daoism and Christianity to demonstrate how religious systems appropriate, transform, and sacralize social gender roles in constructing distinctive cosmologies, conceptions of the body, and soteriologies.

This study examines the modern historiographical reception of the “women’s weaving” motif—a powerful religious metaphor that originated independently in medieval Daoist and Christian settings. By engaging with modern and contemporary scholarship, it interrogates how later interpreters have understood, reconfigured, or imprecisely framed this imagery. Central to this inquiry is a critical assessment of the alignment—and misalignment—between these recent readings and the historical sources, weighing their interpretive insights against their omissions. This reflective critique constitutes the core of the paper’s argument and underpins its conclusions.

Temporally, the analysis concentrates on the medieval period (ca. 3rd–10th centuries)1, which allows us to trace the emergence, development, and consolidation of the “women’s weaving” image within both traditions. A set of questions follows naturally. In the near absence of historical contact2, why did two civilizational–religious formations at opposite ends of Eurasia independently elevate women’s textile labor into a theologically productive metaphor? What universal cognitive structures concerning gender, labor, and the sacred are revealed by this shared choice? Conversely, in what ways do the divergent deployments of the image refract contrasting theological cosmologies, techniques of the body, and gender ideology? Furthermore, given the near-global premodern pattern of “men’s ploughing and women’s weaving”, why did the sacralization of “women’s weaving” not find a parallel, systematic development for “men’s ploughing”? What gender politics and religious logics lie behind this asymmetry?

Pursuing these questions requires more than cataloging similarities and differences. Its scholarly significance is threefold. First, it moves beyond single-civilization frameworks to show—through comparative religion and symbolic anthropology—how religious language both draws upon and transfigures everyday experience, especially gendered labor, in constructing sacral worlds. Second, it answers calls for gender-sensitive inquiry by probing the fraught, mutually constitutive entanglement between religious symbolism and gendered power. Close analysis of the highly gendered motif of “female weaving” reveals how medieval religious discourse simultaneously constrained and empowered women: binding them to specific regimes of labor and virtue while opening distinctive avenues to the sacred and, at times, conferring limited religious authority.

A brief review of scholarship clarifies the project’s intervention. First, within Daoist studies, work on women and symbolic systems—exemplified by discussions of the Xiwangmu 西王母 (Queen Mother of the West)3—has demonstrated the interweaving of nüxian 女仙4, textile, and astral imagery, thereby constructing a “sacred feminine world”, with weaving as a key narrative node (Cahill 1993). Robin R. Wang’s edited volume spans sources from the pre-Qin through the Song and engages metaphors of female bodies and cultivation, including rhetorical networks of zhijin 織錦 (brocade-weaving) and jingwe 經緯 (warp-weft) (R. R. Wang 2003). Tobias Benedikt Zürn demonstrates that the Huainanzi 淮南子 self-consciously deploys weaving imagery to characterize its intertextual compositional practice, casting writing itself as an act of weaving that fashions a textual artifact embodying the Dao and activating its connective powers—an important point of entry for reconstructing the early intellectual matrix behind Daoist associations between women and textile symbolism (Zürn 2020, pp. 370–72). Chinese-language scholarship such as Zhan Shichuang systematizes everyday-life religious metaphors, while Li Song integrates visual materials in Daoist art to analyze images of women and labor (Zhan 2012; S. Li 2008). Huang Yongfeng and Geng Qiongke argue that nüdan 女丹 (female alchemy)conceptualizes menstrual blood as concentrated procreative power homologous with the goddess’s fecund force; on this basis, women can cultivate immortality—hence the programmatic claim that “every woman is a goddess (Huang and Geng 2023).” Building on a material-religion perspective, Tan Qiu and Yuan Chufeng theorize Daoist ritual dress as a “wearable interface for spiritual practice,” translating abstract cosmology into matter through materials, chromatic coding, and astral patterning (Tan and Yuan 2025). Complementing this theoretical frame, recent digital-heritage work employs 3D virtual simulation to reconstruct the attire of Daoist celestial figures, offering practice-level visualization of female immortals’ garments (e.g., Wang et al. 2024). However, most studies remain internally focused within Daoism, with limited cross-religious comparison and insufficient attention to the paired symbolism of “men’s ploughing and women’s weaving”.

Second, within Christian studies, scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum demonstrate how women fashioned religious subjectivity and authority through daily labor (e.g., cooking, weaving) (Bynum 1987). At the institutional level, the Rule of Saint Benedict integrates “prayer and work” (Ora et Labora) into monastic rhythms, thereby conferring spiritual significance upon manual labor (including textile work in women’s communities) (The Rule of Saint Benedict 48 (hereafter RB), Benedict of Nursia 2011). Recent scholarship sharpens this picture. Katherine Allen Smith demonstrates that medieval monks’ sewing operated as a discipline of humility and self-abasement—precisely by rejecting the secular coding of stitchery as feminine—thereby supplying a crucial masculine perspective on the gendered meanings and spiritual value of textile labor in Christian contexts (K. A. Smith 2025). These works illuminate why weaving became central to women’s spiritual exercises, although sustained Eurasian comparison with other traditions (e.g., Daoism) remains scarce.

Third, scholarship on the histories of textiles and gender provides the social-historical ground for this study. From the vantage of medieval aesthetics, Umberto Eco analyzes the interlocking of textiles, ornament, and conceptions of order (Eco 2002); from a technology-gender perspective, Francesca Bray elucidates how the production-household regime of “men plow, women weave” co-constituted the gendered division of labor, thereby furnishing an analytical framework for the social bases of the “women’s weaving” motif and for the cultural mechanisms by which it came to be sacralized (Bray 1997). Recent scholarship further substantiates and extends this analysis. Drawing on a pan-Eurasian survey, Blessing et al. show that textile production—from fiber preparation and spinning to weaving and sewing—was overwhelmingly organized as women’s labor, providing the social ground for the “woman-weaving” motif (Blessing et al. 2023). On methodology, Laura Pottinger proposes “piecing, stitching, and steeping” as productive metaphors for early-stage, multi-sited research, offering a flexible frame for juxtaposing this motif across traditions (Pottinger 2024). Within Daoist studies, Geng Qiongke analyzes nüdan practices—such as “beheading the red dragon” and imagined “female-to-male transformation”—to show how menstruation is ritualized as creative potency that reconfigures the body’s social and soteriological meanings (Geng 2025). For the Christian side, Jenny C. Bledsoe demonstrates how a Cistercian arma Christi manuscript mobilizes images of women’s textile work as tactile prompts within male devotional practice, thereby nuancing the gendered semantics of textile labor (Bledsoe 2021). Taken together, these works suggest that the gendering of textile labor is, first and foremost, a pervasive social fact, while its religious “sacralization” is a symbolic sublimation and institutional internalization built upon that foundation.

Fourth, art history and iconography, especially research on women’s monastic visual culture, reveal the interaction between labor and devotion (Hamburger 1997); parallel studies in East Asian visual traditions offer clues for tracing “women’s weaving” at the level of image (Weidner 1990). Building on the histories of textiles and gender, this body of scholarship supplies a robust social-historical groundwork for the present study. Bledsoe’s iconographic reading of the O Vernicle manuscript shows how close attention to fabric texture structures affective devotion; Nathalie Le Luel’s analysis of embroidered Becket vestments likewise demonstrates how patterned textiles encode cult and commemoration—together foregrounding the evidentiary force of visual materials for interpreting the religious meanings of the “women’s weaving” motif. Extending beyond static images, Audrey Gouy argues that in dynamic ritual contexts such as dance, dress functions as an embodied, communicative medium that conveys affect, identity, and cosmological claims, offering a cross-cultural point of comparison for the motif’s performative enactment (Bledsoe 2021; Le Luel 2022; Gouy 2023). Even so, a systematic integration of such visual evidence within a Daoism–Christianity comparative frame remains to be achieved.

Existing research is substantial but often stalls at a tripartite divide—across civilizations, disciplines, and gendered vantage points. This study moves beyond that impasse in four ways. First, adopting a cross-cultural lens, it juxtaposes the “women’s weaving” motif at both ends of Eurasia, answering calls for a genuinely global historical vision. Second, through interdisciplinary integration, it builds a three-dimensional analysis—thought, image, and practice—thereby bridging the persistent split between ideas and materiality. Third, through a sustained gender analysis, it traces the asymmetry between “women’s weaving” and “men’s farming” within symbolic systems to expose the logic of religious gender construction. Finally, via a focused comparative case study, it aims at a macro-level synthesis of core tenets in Daoist and Christian traditions.

To make our comparative design explicit—and to prevent differences in evidentiary density from being misread—we specify our method and scope upfront. While the article is comparative, its analytic anchor lies in medieval Daoist materials and the Daoist questions they raise about gendered symbolism, ritual practice, and techniques of the body. The Christian tradition is thus treated as a contrastive interlocutor: not an exhaustive survey of Christian theology, but a deliberately selective set of widely attested textual and institutional nodes that makes the comparison diagnostically sharp. On the Christian side, we privilege core primary anchors—especially doctrinal formulations of creation and Incarnation and monastic regulations of manual labor—read alongside representative scholarship in medieval theology, monastic studies, and material religion. Differences in evidentiary density are therefore methodological rather than accidental, enabling us to show how similar textile idioms are mobilized to perform distinct kinds of religious work in each tradition. The aim is not to adjudicate doctrinal completeness, but to clarify the distinct symbolic–practical mechanisms by which each tradition sacralizes gendered labor.

On this basis, the selection of core materials is tightly organized around the presentation and transformation of the “women’s weaving” motif. On the Daoist side, the analysis focuses on inner-canonical texts—Zhen’gao 真誥 (Declarations of the Perfected), Taishang Huangting neijing yujing 太上黃庭內景玉經 (Jade Scripture of the Yellow Court: Inner View), etc. On the Christian side, it surveys relevant biblical passages, patristic exegesis, hagiography that foregrounds women’s textile virtues, and monastic regulations such as the Rule of Saint Benedict, which helped to institutionalize textile labor. In addition, this study frames dress and cloth as elements of a broader Christian religious-symbolic understanding, rather than as mere material handiwork (Ambrosio 2021). Visual evidence—Daoist murals and Christian manuscript illuminations—functions not merely as illustration but as an independent language articulating theological concepts. Guided by the theoretical insights of Jonathan Z. Smith and Gilbert Durand, the analysis seeks controlled comparability while avoiding forced analogies (J. Z. Smith 1982, 1990; Durand 1999). The article proceeds as follows: it delineates the manifestations, layered metaphors, and diachronic development of “women’s weaving” in medieval Daoism and Christianity; it then juxtaposes these strands to excavate the theological and social roots of their differences across ideas, imagery, and practice; finally, it offers conclusions toward a more nuanced understanding of the entanglements among religion, gender, and civilization.

2. “Women’s Weaving” Motif in Medieval Daoism: Sacred Archetype, Visual Presentation, and Bodily Practice

Within the intricate symbolic framework of medieval Daoism, the motif of “women’s weaving” transcends mere literary metaphor, constituting instead a core sacred metaphor deeply embedded in its cosmology, somatic vision, and ascetic practices. It ingeniously reconfigures a socially gendered, mundane labor into a metaphysical idiom of cosmic generativity, divine fabrication, and personal transcendence. Guided by an analytical trajectory that moves from intellectual origins through artistic representations to ritual performance, this section delineates the manifold expressions of this motif, consistently contextualizing it through its implicit dialogue with the “men’s ploughing” motif. Through this approach, the study seeks to fully illuminate the motifs of profound religious connotations and their distinct gendered dimensions.

2.1. Intellectual Origins: The Feminine Principle and the Paradigm of Yin-Yang 陰-陽 Generation

This subsection elucidates the doctrinal premises under which the motif of “women’s weaving” acquires conceptual weight in medieval Daoism. At the most fundamental level, the image is anchored in a cosmology of huasheng lun 化生論 (continuous generation and transformation)5 that confers a privileged status upon yin/pin 牝 (feminine). In contrast to Christianity’s transcendent Creator and the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, Daoist cosmogenesis is construed as an immanent, continuous process of differentiation and flowing transformation: from the undifferentiated Dao 道 there unfold “one” yi 一, “two” er 二, “three” san 三, and finally the abundant “myriad creatures” wanwu 萬物. Within this framework, the cosmos is imagined as a vast, living organism whose creative activity never ceases. The feminine principle is anything but passive or merely auxiliary: it functions as an active and indispensable power of gestation and nurture.

Against this background, “women’s weaving” comes to function as a paradigmatic emblem of this ongoing work of creation. Its elevation to an ontological symbol rests, first of all, on its intrinsic consonance with the cosmology of the Daodejing 《道德经》. Section 6 explicitly affirms that “xuanpin zhimen 玄牝之門，是谓天地根 (the gateway of the dark female, this is called the root of the world.)”, indicating a primordial, maternal generativity as the ground of cosmogenesis (Daodejing, chap. 6; Ames and Hall 2003),6 treating maternal reproductive power as the very source of the cosmos; the text’s praise of the “female” pin 牝, the quiescent jing 静, and the soft rou 柔 provides basic philosophical warrant for raising the weaving woman to a cosmological register (Chen 2003, p. 98). On this cosmological premise, the structural homology between textile practice and the Dao’s generative logic can be traced along at least three axes. First, the process by which scattered threads are woven into an ordered pattern offers a micro-image of the Dao’s bringing the ten thousand things into being: chapter 42 famously compresses this process into the formula “The Dao gives birth to One. One gives birth to Two. Two gives birth to Three. And Three gives birth to all things.” (道生一，一生二，二生三，三生萬物) (Daodejing chap. 42; Lao Tzu 1975, p. 103). Second, the repetitive and never-finished character of weaving concretizes the Daodejing’s depiction of the Dao as an inexhaustible source that continually gives things life and sustenance, translating this ever-generative mode of existence into a rhythmic everyday craft: the loom never stops, just as the Dao silently and ceaselessly generates the myriad beings. Third, as paradigmatically women’s work, weaving resonates with the text’s valuation of yin and softness: the Daodejing repeatedly asserts that “the soft and the weak overcome the hard and the strong” (柔弱勝剛強) and urges the sage to “know the male yet keep to the role of the female” (知其雄，守其雌) (Daodejing chap. 28, 36, 78; Lao Tzu 1975, pp. 85, 95, 140). In this way, the figure of the woman at the loom gathers and bears this yin-centered cosmological orientation, and is thereby elevated to a symbolic form that points to the very “root” of cosmic generation. As Zürn demonstrates through his analysis of the Huainanzi, there existed in the Han dynasty a conscious practice of regarding writing as weaving, whose fundamental purpose was to create “an efficacious, textual artifact that embodies the Way”, and that the text’s intertextual design is precisely “the result of a literary attempt to create an efficacious, textual artifact that embodies the Way by incorporating the act of weaving in its textual design” (Zürn 2020, p. 367). This provides essential pre-imperial/Han intellectual grounding for later Daoist moves to sacralize women’s textile labor as a technology of cosmic creation.

In Daoist sources, the textile labor of female immortals is not framed as obedience to an external will, but as the spontaneous manifestation, on a cosmic scale, of the Dao’s generative power. The rhythm of their looms is construed as isomorphic with the rhythms of cosmic movement, the tiandao 天道 (the way of heaven)7. Thus, the Tianguan shu 天官書 (Treatise on the Celestial Offices) in the Shiji 史記 locates Zhinü xing 織女星 (the Weaver Star) north of Wünü 婺女, identifying her as “granddaughter of the heavenly maiden,” while later commentary glosses her as presiding over “fruits and gourds, silks, and precious goods” (果蓏絲帛珍寶), thereby correlating celestial patterns with terrestrial sericulture, weaving, and material abundance (Sima 2013, vol. 4, p. 1311; Shiji “Tianguan shu” 正義 ad loc.; see also Jinshu 11, “Tianwen zhi”). By contrast, Southern Dynasties Shangqing 上清8 Daoist texts such as the Zhen’gao construct a pantheon of Shangqing female immortals composed of stellar goddesses and jade maidens, who, in revelatory and soteriological contexts, function as key mediators guiding adepts toward ascent to higher realms and petitioning for protection and longevity. The regimen of Shangqing cultivation presented in the Zhen’gao repeatedly enjoins cunsi 存思 (the visualization)9 of stars and the ritual veneration of female immortals to obtain protection, avert calamities, sharpen mental clarity, and extend life (Zhen’gao 1988–1992, DZ 1016, Daozang, vol. 20).

This practical configuration suggests that weaving-centered imagery has been transformed from a marker of purely material production into a crucial symbolic resource for inscribing heavenly order and mapping the path of cultivation. Within this interpretive framework, the Weaver Maiden’s loom no longer merely “weaves” silk, but can be read as participating in the celestial operation of “weaving” destiny and the adept’s progressive journey toward immortality.

In numerous hagiographies of nüxian, textile work functions as a signature marker of sacred identity. Take, for instance, the immortal Magu 麻姑10: her “talon-like hands” are not mere corporeal exaggeration but are folded into the medieval “bird-goddess” motif to index her transcendent divinity (Campany 2002, p. 262; Geng and Huang 2023, p. 2). The attendants of Xiwangmu are likewise often shown in yunjin zhipei 雲錦之帔 (cloud-brocade cloaks): for example, the scene is recorded in Zhen’gao that “the divine woman wore a cloud-brocade skirt, cinnabar above and azure below, brilliant in color and light” (神女著雲錦裳，上丹下青，文采光鮮), and Daofa huiyuan 道法會元 (Collected Essentials of Daoist Rituals) further notes “a seven-hued, night-luminous cloud-brocade mantle” (七色夜光雲錦之帔帶). Such cloud-brocade vesture not only signifies radiance and majesty; it also advertises the strict hierarchies of the celestial realm (Zhen’gao 1988–1992, DZ 1016, Daozang, vol. 20, p. 494; Daofa huiyuan 1988–1992, DZ 1220, Daozang, vol. 30, p. 112). When a mortal is granted such celestial clothing, it marks a fundamental transformation of status—acceptance into the community of the immortals. Accordingly, the weaving and bestowal-of-raiment rites associated with nüxian enact a continuous, world-sustaining work of sacred creation.

Notably, when set against its putative counterpart of “men’s ploughing”, the symbolism of “women’s weaving” exhibits a pronounced asymmetry. In Daoist mythic discourse, the Zhinü is richly elaborated, whereas her counterpart, Niulang 牛郎 (the Cowherd; Qianniuxing 牵牛星/Altair)—though often cast as a patron of agriculture—has attracted far less sustained theological elaboration and systematization. This asymmetry, in turn, highlights Daoist thought’s distinctive esteem for feminine creativity. Zong Lin (宗懔)’s Jingchu suishi ji 《荊楚歲時記》 frames the Qixi 七夕 festival as the yearly reunion of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl: “On the seventh night of the seventh month, it is the night when Niúláng and Zhinü meet across the river” (七月七日，篇牽牛織女聚會之夜) and goes on to note that “on this night, the women of each household twist coloured threads and pass them through seven-holed needles … in order to ‘beg for skill’” (是夕，人家婦女結綵縷，穿七孔針……以乞巧), a rite that sacralizes women’s textile dexterity (Zong 1988, pp. 190, 194, 209–12). The same passage and its annotations collect older astro-omen lore, explaining that “the Weaver Girl’s divine name is ‘She who gathers yin’” (織女神名收陰) and that “the Weaver Girl is the Heavenly Emperor’s granddaughter, also called the Heavenly Granddaughter, who for years on end weaves cloud brocades” (織女篇天帝孫女，亦稱天孫，長年織造雲錦), while “the Niú star, which in Jingzhou is called Hegu, governs bridges and fords” (牽牛星荊州呼篇河鼓，主關梁) (Zong 1988, pp. 191–92). A Lingbao liturgy, the Taishang Dongxuan lingbao hu zhu tongzi jing 太上洞玄靈寶護諸童子經, further embeds Zhinü in a celestial bureaucracy by listing “River-Maiden Weaver Girl” 河姑織女 among the “star officials of the Three Offices of heaven, earth, and water” (星官局天地水三官河姑織女天河星衆) invoked to protect children and distribute longevity (Taishang Dongxuan lingbao hu zhu tongzi jing 1988, DZ 328, Daozang, vol. 5, p. 901). Taken together, these sources show that women’s textile labour, precisely because it enacts “transformation” (turning tangled fibres into ordered cloth) and “creation” (bringing new material forms into being), is granted a denser theological elaboration than Niúláng/牽牛’s largely functional association with crossings and fields; it is therefore “women’s weaving,” rather than “men’s ploughing,” that emerges as a privileged metaphor for cosmic creation and ongoing world-making in the Daoist imaginary.

This symbolic choice likewise mirrors the social realities of the medieval era. Within the familial division of labor characterized by “men’s ploughing and women’s weaving”, textile work constituted the primary productive activity and source of economic contribution for women. By sanctifying this labor, Daoism acknowledged women’s value within the social fabric while simultaneously providing them with a channel for transcendence beyond the secular realm. As Cahill observes, the Queen Mother’s sheng headdress connect the goddess with the creation and maintenance of the universe through literally weaving its fabric, so that “the picture of the goddess as weaver or creator” becomes a central image through which female Daoist immortals imagine their religious agency and empowerment (Cahill 1993, pp. 16–17).

2.2. Visual Imagery: Female Transcendents, Celestial Garments, and the Construction of Sacred Space

Material and visual culture substantiate the sacralization of “women’s weaving.” These artifacts do not merely illustrate texts; they articulate theological concepts in an autonomous visual language.

In extant murals and stone carvings—preeminently the Chaoyuan tu 朝元圖 in the Sanqing Hall of Yongle Palace (Ruicheng, Shanxi)—female deities are repeatedly marked by textile-coded emblems (X. Wang 1963, pp. 19–39; Gesterkamp 2011, pp. 97–105). High-ranking nüxian such as the Xiwangmu and Wei Huacun 魏華存11 often appear in yunjin zhipei, feathered skirts, and broad sleeves with trailing watersleeves. These tianyi天衣 (celestial garments)12 are not decorative excess; they function as visible tokens of sacred identity and creative efficacy. Their motifs—cloud-vapors, astral bodies, phoenixes—simultaneously echo the distribution of celestial offices in the Chaoyuan tu and, through auspicious bird imagery, signal rank and felicity (Yang 2008, pp. 38–41, 三清殿; X. Wang 1963, pp. 32–35). As Lennert Gesterkamp notes, Wu Daozi’s Heavenly Court compositions introduced “new aspects of an imperial presentation and a linear (hierarchical) arrangement of the procession in Daoist Heavenly Court painting” (Gesterkamp 2011, p. 73); in effect, the entire courtly cosmos is thereby “woven” into legible order by the paired imagery of weaving–bestowal.

By contrast, the vesture of high-ranking male deities—most explicitly the Jade Emperor 玉皇大帝13—foregrounds authority via regalia (beaded mianguan crowns) and court robes, while occluding the processes of textile production (Gesterkamp 2011, pp. 84–85, 100–1)—while occluding the processes of textile production. This visual grammar coheres with the bureaucratic imaginary of the Tianting chaohui 天庭朝會 (Heavenly Court audience)14 and reinforces the exclusive linkage between female agency and “weaving–creation.” By contrast, as Yang Lihui, An Deming, and Jessica Anderson Turner note of Shennong 神農, he “invented some important farm tools such as the axe, hoe, and leisi, a plowlike farm tool used in ancient China” (Yang et al. 2005, p. 192), and in this capacity teaches humans how to cultivate the land. Some Daoist (and related popular) images therefore depict male deities with agricultural implements—Shennong’s plow or sheaves of grain—signifying instruction in farming. Yet, as Suzanne E. Cahill notes, in early sources “the picture of the goddess as weaver or creator contrasts with her image as tiger or destroyer. Both seem essential parts of her identity” (Cahill 1993, p. 16), underscoring the explicitly cosmogenic weight carried by “women’s weaving”. By contrast, Gesterkamp shows that Wu Daozi (吳道子)’s Heavenly Court murals reorganize the scene around an explicitly imperial and hierarchical courtly procession (Gesterkamp 2011, p. 73). In this visual economy, the “male ploughing” motif remains primarily didactic and administrative and is only rarely elevated to explicitly cosmological or ontological registers.

Moreover, while direct representations of weaving are relatively uncommon in Daoist iconography, Daoist visual culture itself is, as Shih-shan Susan Huang notes, dominated by “the majority of images preserved in the Daoist canon … [which] are aniconic images” and by “the interlocking relationship of talismans, words, and pictures” (Huang 2014, p. 1049). In this context, the textile dimension of “weaving” is more often suggested through the silk support and related motifs than through explicit scenes of women at the loom. For instance, in depictions of celestial processions—whether courtiers paying homage to the primordial or immortals on journeys—the undulating immortal ribbons and swirling mists often create flowing lines that evoke a dynamically interlaced warp and weft (Xiao 2008, pp. 160–65). The entire heavenly realm appears as if being woven upon a vast, invisible loom, wherein nüxian are not only wearers of this divine jin 錦 (brocade) but are also subtly portrayed as its creators and sustainers (Huang 2014, pp. 1016–18). This visual strategy is particularly pronounced in the Court Assembling for Worship mural at Yongle Palace’s Sanqing Hall: the nüxian’ flowing ribbons generate a vivid sense of motion and rhythm, while the directional flow of drapery and clouds visually articulates the hierarchical order among the deities (Xiao 2008, pp. 128–33, 160–65; Gesterkamp 2011, esp. on Chaoyuan tu).

Such pictorial narratives establish a sacred realm centered on feminine creativity. This realm stands in both visual and symbolic contrast to the earthly domain of land and agriculture epitomized by “men’s ploughing”—even though Daoist cosmology incorporates transcendent analogues like the yutian 玉田 and the lingzhi 靈芝 fungus.15 Through this motif, art corroborates a conceptual inclination found in textual sources: within Daoism’s symbolic universe, “women’s weaving” and its tianyi emerge as a visually privileged language for constructing sacredness and cosmic order. Contemporary digital-reconstruction research further substantiates this point. As demonstrated through a 3D simulation to reconstruct the attire of the immortal maidens in the Chaoyuan tu, showing that garment hierarchy, patterning—such as the cloud-and-phoenix borders and tortoise-shell motif on the Queen Mother of the West’s robe—and color coordination map closely onto ritual rank and function; visually, the celestial robe thus operates as a precisely decodable semiotic system, i.e., the material product of “women’s weaving” (Wang et al. 2024, pp. 2–3). Likewise, Tan and Yuan argue that the natural affordances of Daoist vestimentary materials (e.g., the deliberate retention of “imperfection,” the rough hand of ramie, and the evanescent, cloud-like sheen of silk) instantiate the principle that “the Dao follows Nature,” thereby turning the body into a “wearable interface for spiritual practice.” (Tan and Yuan 2025, pp. 7–8).

2.3. Ritual Practice: Interior Cultivation and the Weaving of Scripture

Most concretely, the motif of “women’s weaving” is internalized as techniques of the body and as ritual practice, providing an operative metaphor through which practitioners pursue transformation. This trajectory peaks in the medieval period—especially the Tang period—and correlates with the rise of neidan xue 內丹學 (Daoist internal alchemy)16.

Within neidan discourse, physiological processes are reimagined through a textile lexicon. The jingluo 經絡 (channel network) is conceptualized as warp and weft: as Catherine Despeux succinctly defines it, it is “a system of ‘conduits’ … which connect the upper body parts to the lower, and the inner viscera to the surface of the body” (Despeux 2008, p. 565). Qi 氣 (vital energy) then functions like a shuttling thread that traverses this network. Under the governance of shen 神 (spirit), cultivation aims to refine and congeal jing 精 (essence), qi, and shen through breath regulation, cunsi, and carefully calibrated huohou 火候 (firing times). Summarizing this neidan physiology, Fabrizio Pregadio notes that “jing, qi, and shen are often referred to as the Three Treasures (sanbao 三寶), an expression that reveals the importance and close connection among them,” while Louis Komjathy glosses these “vital substances” as “jing, qi, and shen” contained in a body “defined largely in terms of the so-called organ-meridian system, in which qi circulates” (Pregadio 2008, p. 562; Komjathy 2015, p. 558). As Geng’s analysis shows, the nüdan techniques of zhan chilong 斬赤龍 (beheading the Red Dragon) and nühuan nanti 女還男體 (female-to-male bodily transformation) aim to arrest the conversion of precelestial primordial qi into postcelestial yin blood and to reverse this flow through specific bodily regimens. In this framework, menstruation is the monthly depletion of a finite store of primordial qi; practice therefore seeks to sublimate blood into qi and reconstitute the body’s basic disposition from yin to yang—a profound, internal “weaving” and reconstruction of the self (Geng 2025, pp. 3–4). The Taishang Huangting neijing yujing renders this inner genesis in visionary language: “The person within the Yellow Court wears brocade garments; her purple radiant skirt is of cloud-gauze (黃庭內人服錦衣，紫華飛裙雲氣羅),” “All alike wear purple robes and flying gauze skirts (同服紫衣飛羅裳) (Taishang Huangting neijing yujing 1988–1992, DZ 331, Daozang, vol. 5, p. 909).” It is also said, “The Spirit, born within the core, holds the jade pendant (神生腹中銜玉璫),” paired with the earlier line “The Dipper’s jade hues, emerald and grand, gaze upon the child, hovering in meditation (璇璣玉衡色蘭玕，瞻望童子坐盤桓),” to symbolize the cyclical rhythm of the cosmos—its internal cadence (Robinet 1993, pp. 64–65, 71–74; Taishang Huangting neijing yujing 1988–1992, DZ 331, Daozang, vol. 5, p. 910). The upshot is that the adept ultimately “puts on” not external cloth but a numinous energy–body or shengtai 聖胎 (sacred embryo)17 wrought through inward refinement—a divine body woven from within (Pregadio 2008, pp. 883–84; Pregadio 2016, p. 209).

This practical register refracts the gendered division of labor. As Louis Komjathy notes, female alchemy “usually follows similar stages and processes of internal alchemy, though there is greater emphasis on the lived experience of female embodiment, of being a woman,” including “the central importance of the breasts, heart, blood, and uterus, and on menstruation as the primary form of dissipation of women’s jing” (Komjathy 2014, p. 205); in parallel, Fabrizio Pregadio’s reading of the Neijing tu 內經圖 highlights the Herd Boy’s conjunction with “his lover, the Weaving Girl … pictured below him while she works at the loom,” so that the central Cinnabar Field becomes “the place of the conjunction of Yin and Yang” (Pregadio 2021, p. 120). Hu Yin, a Tang–dynasty Daoist priestess, presents in the Huangting neijing wuzang liufu buxie tu 黃庭內景五臟六腑補瀉圖 (Illustrations for Supplementing and Draining the Five Viscera and Six Bowels within the Yellow Court’s Inner Landscape) a text–and–image exposition of the spirits of the five viscera and six bowels and their methods of regulation, with particular emphasis on breathing techniques, daoyin 導引 (guiding and pulling)18, and dietary cultivation; the regimen is sustained throughout by cunsi with the aim of warding off aging and prolonging life (J. Jia 2015, pp. 1–2, 11; Hu 1988–1992, DZ 432, Daozang, vol. 6, pp. 686–93). Furthermore, Tan and Yuan argue that the structural hierarchies and patterned motifs of Daoist ritual attire—constellations, the Big Dipper, and the Eight Trigrams—operate in ceremony as a dynamic interface for cultivation, guiding visualization and the Pace of the Dipper so as to align bodily energy with the cosmic field. In this way, clothing materializes abstract cosmology as a wearable cultivation interface, which resonates with the transformation of women’s textile labor into embodied technique in the “woman-weaving” topos (Tan and Yuan 2025, pp. 5, 9–10). In this way, “women’s weaving” is transformed from an external social division of labor into an internal imagistic and methodological framework for bodily cultivation. As Elena Valussi notes, the emergence of nüdan “marks a necessity to create a female sphere of activities in this field, where the woman is the central actor”, so that female alchemy affords women practitioners a distinctive route toward self-cultivation and interpretation (Valussi 2014, p. 202). The deep rationale for this distinctive regimen rests on a specific premise: menstrual blood is not defilement but the embodied medium of divine creative power, co-originating with the cosmic goddess; accordingly, its transformative refinement is framed as a sacred vocation (Huang and Geng 2023, pp. 1, 10). Such inside-out bodily transformation constitutes a dynamic rite in its own right. Ulrike Beck’s study of ancient East-Central Asian skirts demonstrates that they were “explicitly designed for motion,” garments engineered so that movement is magnified into a continuous visual narrative. This design logic closely resonates with the deeper Daoist metaphor of “women’s weaving,” whereby sacred order is woven through embodied labor—whether weaving at the loom, circulating qi, or ritual dance (Gouy 2023, p. 23).

Within narratives of the production and transmission of scriptures, “weaving” likewise plays a pivotal role. Scriptural texts are often described as tianshu yunzhuan 天書雲篆 (celestial writings in cloud-seal script), their characters likened to the patterns of woven brocade (J. Zhang 1988–1992, DZ 1032, Daozang, vol. 22, p. 41). In procedures of bestowal and safekeeping, registers and scriptures are accompanied by yunjin nang 雲錦囊 (cloud-brocade pouch)19 and housed in the jiutian shangzang 九天上藏 (storehouses of the Nine Heavens)20, thus highlighting a dual sacrality—material and symbolic—of holy writings: “All the scriptures promulgated by the Three Primes are engraved as Books of the Golden Elixir, enclosed in pouches of natural cloud-brocade, sealed with the seals of the Precious Gods of the Three Primes, and stored high above the Nine Heavens (三元布經皆刻金丹之書, 盛以自然云锦之囊, 封以三元寶神之章, 藏於九天之上)” (J. Zhang 1988–1992, DZ 1032, Daozang, vol. 22, pp. 42, 54). Within the Shangqing system, the houshengjun 後聖君 ”Later Saint Lords” narratives recorded in the Shangqing Housheng Daojun Liji 上清後聖道君列紀 (Hu 1988–1992, DZ 432, Daozang, vol. 6, pp. 745–46) may be read alongside this conception that fuses scripture, pouch-receptacle, and heavenly depository into a single whole: the very fabric of brocade is itself the product of sacred weaving, employed to enfold and exalt writing of equal sanctity. Accordingly, scripture may be understood as the textual embodiment of the Dao, and cloud-brocade as the Dao’s material embodiment—the two sharing a common origin and substance.

The association between weaving and divine revelation can be partly understood through the focused concentration and repetitive rhythm inherent to the textile labor—a quality that aligns with the meditative quiescence practiced in the Shangqing tradition (Robinet 1989, pp. 183–85). In hagiographies of Daoist female transcendents, the routine of “women’s weaving” is often situated within a framework of spiritual cultivation and mystical communion. A case in point is the account of Bian Dongxuan in Yongcheng jixian lu 《墉城集仙錄》卷八〈邊洞玄〉, who “applied herself diligently to weaving by day and night without rest (紡織勤勤，晝夜不懈),” and through such hidden merit and practice encountered an immortal who granted her an elixir and access to the Dao (J. Zhang 1988–1992, DZ 1032, Daozang, vol. 22, p. 803). In late-antique “Spinning Annunciation” imagery, the domestic weaving space becomes a temporarily consecrated locus of contemplation; Marian spinning is framed as “work as a sacred conversation,” while marriage rings and household textiles bind domestic labor to moral virtue and divine epiphany (Taylor 2018, pp. 71, 100–1).

Notably, this mode of revelation via weaving appears almost exclusively associated with women. Male adherents generally received Daoist transmission through alternative channels—such as mountain journeys to seek masters, liturgical ceremonies, or oral instruction within a master-disciple lineage21. This gendered distinction further underscores the unique status of “women’s weaving” in Daoist religious practice.

In sum, medieval Daoism—across doctrinal discourse, visual repertoires, and ascetic techniques—recasts “women’s weaving” from a marker of gendered labor into a governing metaphor linking cosmology to soteriology. Ideologically, it is grounded in a cosmogony of yin-yang transformation, elevating women’s labor into a central paradigm for interpreting the Dao’s generative power. Visually, it reinforces female creative agency through depictions of transcendents’ flowing robes and a dynamically woven sacred cosmos. Practically, weaving was internalized as a somatic discipline and a source of scriptural authority, offering female practitioners a distinctive path to transcendence. Ultimately, medieval Daoism envisioned a “textile cosmos” animated by a feminine principle, wherein “women’s weaving” served as a vital technique for both cosmic integration and self-transformation. Relative to men’s ploughing, women’s weaving enjoys doctrinal and practical primacy—a primacy that not only mirrors its social foundations but also registers Daoism’s distinctive affirmation and sacral valorization of female creative power. By transforming mundane labor into a sacred paradigm, Daoism profoundly enriched the symbolic repertoire of Chinese religious thought and offers a nuanced and compelling case study for examining the interplay between religion and gender.

3. “Women’s Weaving” Motif in Medieval Christianity: Obedient Order, Visual Narratives, and Spiritual Discipline

In contrast to Daoism—which elevates “women’s weaving” into a cosmological metaphor of ontological creation—medieval Christianity develops the “women’s weaving” motif along a different theological trajectory. The image is oriented not toward cosmogenesis or the transformation of nature, but toward the mystery of the Incarnation22, the mimesis of sacred order (Imitatio Dei), and spiritual discipline enacted through labor. Following the analytic framework of intellectual origins, visual imagery, and ritual practice, this section examines the image’s multiple facets within the Christian tradition and, where relevant, contrasts it with male-coded work (e.g., agriculture, scholarship, ordained ministry) to clarify its distinctive religious meanings and gender politics.

3.1. Intellectual Origins: Creation, the Incarnation, and a Gendered Economy of Virtue

The theological grounding of the Christian “women’s weaving” motif lies in the paired doctrines of Creation and the Incarnation and is systematically elaborated—and sacralized—within the patristic exegetical tradition. In contrast to Daoist huasheng lun, classical Christian theology affirms creatio ex nihilo: by God’s free will and Word all things came to be, a teaching conventionally derived from a synthesis of Genesis’ creation account with deuterocanonical and apostolic testimony (Gen. 1:1–31; 2 Macc. 7:28; Heb. 11:3, NRSVUE; here and throughout; see also May 1994, pp. 6–8, 21, 24). On this basis, an absolute ontological distinction obtains between Creator and creation. Within that doctrinal frame, the “women’s weaving” motif receives concentrated expression in narratives of the Incarnation: early Christian tradition (the Protoevangelium of James) records that the Virgin Mary was chosen to weave purple and scarlet for the Temple and that she received the Annunciation in the very act of weaving—thus establishing the topos in which women’s textile labor figures the Word’s assumption of flesh (Protoevangelium of James 2005, §§10–12; see Elliott 1993, pp. 48–53). Patristic homilies, hymnography, and liturgical-iconographic programs subsequently develop this association, rendering “weaving” simultaneously a sign of obedient cooperation with divine will and a visual metaphor for the mystery of the Incarnation (Prot. Jas. §§10–12).

The Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) furnishes a crucial prototype for this imagery. In the Book of Exodus, God summons and endows Bezalel and Oholiab directly with a “spirit of wisdom,” enabling them “to make all kinds of things,” specifically mentioning work “in blue, purple, and crimson yarns, and in fine linen” (Exod 28:3; 35:35). Here, textile skill is explicitly designated as a form of divine “wisdom”—a God-given talent for participating in the construction of the sacred Tabernacle. A more pivotal text is the celebrated paean to the “capable wife” in Proverbs 31. She “puts her hands to the distaff, and her hands hold the spindle” (Prov 31:19), and is proficient in making coverings and linen garments for her household and for trade (Prov 31:21–22). Within patristic exegesis, Augustine, notably not in De opere monachorum but in a sermon, allegorizes this “woman of strength” from Proverbs 31 as the Church (Ecclesia), utilizing the imagery of the “distaff and spindle” (colus et fusus) to expound upon the exercise of faith and good works (Augustine 1961, Serm. 37.2–3, 11–13). Ambrose’s relevant interpretation, found primarily in De virginibus, links the diligence of the capable wife with the “adornment of virtue”, presenting it as a metaphor for the inner virtue of virgins—and, by extension, all believers. Although he does not interpret each weaving detail explicitly as “weaving the garment of virtue”, the text consistently constructs an image where virtue itself serves as the raiment for the soul (Ambrose 1989, De virg. 1.24–30).

The central Christological event of the New Testament—the Incarnation—was developed within the patristic tradition into a potent “garment/textile” motif. This is encapsulated in the notion that the Divine Word “took” a body from the Virgin and “put it on” (induere), thereby conquering death and corruption (Athanasius 2011, §§8, 44). The mystery of the Holy Spirit’s descent upon Mary and the Son’s assumption of humanity was framed within the context of Mary’s obedience. Irenaeus, one of the earliest systematic exponents of this view, articulates through his theory of “recapitulation” that “the knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary”, thereby describing the soteriological reversal from Eve to Mary (Irenaeus 2002, Adv. haer. III.22.4; SC 210–211). He further juxtaposes Eve and Mary, stating that “the Virgin Mary became the advocate (advocata) of the virgin Eve”, as she, through divine message, “bore God” (Irenaeus 1969, Adv. haer. V.19.1; SC 153). While Athanasius, in On the Incarnation, employs the “putting on/garment” metaphor extensively to explain the Word’s assumption of flesh, he refrains from explicitly identifying Mary as a “weaver”. The stronger, direct imagery of the “loom/weaving” applied to Mary is more pronounced in later patristic poetry and homiletics, particularly in the works of Ephrem the Syrian and Proclus of Constantinople. Ephrem poetically states that Christ “put on the body, the garment of his mother,” while Mary “put on his glory” (Ephrem the Syrian 1989, Hymns on the Nativity 16.11; cf. Nat. 11; 17.4), while Proclus declares more explicitly: “Her [Mary’s] womb became the loom; her blood the thread, weaving the garment of flesh for the Word” (Proclus of Constantinople 2003, Hom. 1; cf. Constas 1995, pp. 182–83). Therefore, for specific textual evidence casting Mary in the role of “weaver”, it is appropriate to cite Ephrem or Proclus, whereas Athanasius provides the foundational theological metaphor of “clothing/putting on”, which, while related, is distinct from the explicit motif of “weaving” itself.

Within this theological framework, the conventional division of labor encapsulated in the phrase “men’s ploughing and women’s weaving” was invested with a sacral order. Male labor—exemplified by Adam’s charge to “till the ground from which he was taken” (Gen 3:23)—was construed as punitive toil oriented toward worldly sustenance and, by extension, toward leadership in the public sphere (e.g., “Her husband is known in the city gates, taking his seat among the elders of the land,” Prov 31:23). By contrast, “women’s weaving” remained firmly anchored in the domestic realm (oikos), its sanctity expressed through the maintenance of interior order, the covering of the body (signifying chastity and humility), and ritual service within sacred spaces. In this idiom of interior piety, Jerome repeatedly links feminine virtue to disciplined withdrawal and modest self-presentation: he urges virgins to “enter into thy chamber, and shut thy door” for prayer, and he instructs Demetrias that “when she goes out she does not uncover her neck and breast, but covers herself with a veil, only her eyes being visible”. Moreover, he explicitly codifies domestic textile labor as a daily discipline of holiness—“to learn to spin, to hold the distaff”, and related tasks (Jerome 1996, Ep. 22.26; 107.10; 130.18). Accordingly, Christian deployments of the motif of “women’s weaving” were theologically sacralized and oriented toward domestic interiority, thereby construing women’s work as a virtue materially enacted through obedient, regulated practice. As Anna McKay shows, medieval texts consistently couple textile work with normative virtues—piety, obedience, and chastity—so that women’s manual labor functions not merely as production but as an outward sign of interior spirituality and a routinized devotional discipline (McKay 2024, pp. 100, 113, 120–21).

3.2. Iconography of Weaving: Female Saints, Visual Narrative, and the Gendered Gaze

The Christian motif of “women’s weaving” finds its most concentrated expression in the iconographic topos of the Annunciation “at the spinning.” Its proximate textual source is the Protoevangelium of James, which relates that Mary was chosen to spin purple and scarlet for the Temple veil and that, in the very midst of this sacred labor, she received Gabriel’s message of the Incarnation (Protoevangelium of James 2005, §§10–12). Received across both Eastern and Western traditions, this narrative generated a rich and durable pictorial repertoire. As Gertrud Schiller shows, standard Annunciation iconography typically presents Mary seated with distaff and spindle—and, in later Western works, beside a spinning wheel—so that spinning functions as a visual shorthand for obedient diligence inseparable from the mystery of the Word made flesh (Schiller 1971, pp. 33–55).

A second recurrent theme concerns weaving and spinning in the vitae and iconography of holy women. As Carlee Bradbury succinctly observes, “spinning is a signifier in medieval and premodern art” and “the spindle and distaff … are loaded symbols in visual representations from medieval manuscripts to early modern prints”, allowing viewers to “read the value, expectations, and depictions of women’s domestic work” through textile tools (Bradbury 2025, p. 1). Within this iconographic code, images of biblical and female devotional figures—above all Eve and Mary, but also a range of later women saints—frequently place a distaff, spindle, or spinning wheel in their hands, so that the implements of textile work function as attributes of sanctity that condense ideals of diligence, chastity, and contemplative discipline (Bradbury 2025; McKay 2024, pp. 73–78; Bledsoe 2021, pp. 49–52). As Jeffrey F. Hamburger has demonstrated, such works are not mere records of domestic labor but complex visual allegories: the act of weaving figures the spiritual process of gathering scattered thoughts unto God and of translating secular material into sacred use (Hamburger 1997, pp. 79, 221–22). From a literary studies perspective, Anna McKay likewise shows that, in hagiography and devotional writing, the repetitive, cadenced motions of textile work are framed as a somatic technique that trains spiritual concentration and disposes one to recollected prayer. Text and image together forge a powerful ascetical metaphor: the repetitive cadence of weaving corresponds to a state of embodied, focused recollection (McKay 2024, pp. 113–14).

In contrast to the active, creative posture often assumed by female immortals weaving in Daoist art, Christian depictions typically present weaving women in modes of receptivity and interiority (Hamburger 1998, p. 30). Downcast eyes and restrained bodily comportment situate them within an inward spiritual world in which they await divine initiative (as in the Annunciation) or pursue sustained contemplation (Hamburger 1998, p. 456). Bledsoe offers a key insight into the spiritual function of this posture: in the Royal manuscript of O Vernicle, the female figures operate as guides for affective response; their depictions holding a swaddled infant invite readers to approach Christ’s Passion in an emotional, caring—indeed maternal—mode, thereby aligning textile labor with “feminine virtues” such as compassion and humility (Bledsoe 2021, pp. 55, 74, 76–77). The textual seed for the Annunciation-weaving motif lies in the Protoevangelium of James, which narrates Mary “spinning purple and scarlet for the temple veil”; this story furnished a durable visual topos subsequently elaborated across East and West (Protoevangelium of James 2005, §§10–12). Standard iconographic handbooks similarly catalogue Mary’s posture and the associated objects (spindle, basket of yarn, etc.) in the Annunciation. As Louis Réau notes in his discussion of La Vierge à la quenouille, “Marie est assise dans sa chambre en train de tisser le voile de pourpre du Temple. Elle tient à la main une quenouille” (Réau 1957, p. 179), and he then lists the main Byzantine and Western examples of this type. Gertrud Schiller’s Iconography of Christian Art likewise surveys Annunciation compositions in which the Virgin appears with a distaff, spindle, or basket of yarn and traces their development across Byzantine and Latin traditions (Schiller 1971, pp. 33–55). The logic of the gaze in these works also encodes gendered power: women appear as pious laborers who are seen, while men—the angel, Christ, or the viewer—often occupy the position of the initiating gaze that recognizes and confirms their virtue. This visual economy resonates with medieval female monastic emphases on interior prayer and “vision within the cell”. As Jeffrey Hamburger observes, small panel paintings and triptychs for nuns “supplied each nun with a meditational image, presumably for use in her cell or, perhaps, in her oratory in the choir,” and could mark the cell itself as “the place where I pray” and receive visions (Hamburger 1998, pp. 102, 430). This visual representation stands in sharp contrast to contemporaneous portrayals of male sanctity, where saints most often appear in public roles as bishops, abbots, or missionary preachers—“aristocratic bishops and abbots, who in their official duties exemplified higher moral values” and foundations that “gave themselves wholeheartedly to missionary work, preaching and converting in the world” (Fouracre and Gerberding 1996, pp. 5, 43).

Thus, Christian motifs of “women’s weaving”—through recurrent motifs, codified bodily postures, and directed structures of the gaze—visually reinforce a theological imagination that locates female sanctity within the domestic sphere, grounded in obedience, labor, and contemplative interiority, in complementary contrast to male sacred roles in the public domain.

3.3. Ritual Practice: Monastic Labor, Charity, and Embodied Prayer

Christian monasticism provided the most institutionalized and practically consequential setting for the motif of “women’s weaving”, transforming it into a core ascetic discipline that structured women’s devotional lives. Many of the material outcomes of women’s devotional labor—ranging from plain monastic cloth to exquisitely embroidered objects—were preserved as precious sacred matter in church treasuries across Europe, offering a silent yet resplendent material witness to women’s spiritual practice (Blessing et al. 2023, pp. 71–73). This broader symbolic horizon helps explain why textiles in medieval Christianity cannot be reduced to a merely gendered craft. As Miller argues, liturgical vesture developed into a “language of clothing” through which clerics claimed holiness and authority, so that textiles functioned within an ecclesial symbolic economy rather than as mere handiwork; moreover, this vestimentary culture was materially enabled by women makers, whose skilled production and repair of sacred garments could participate in—and sometimes complicate—clerical spirituality and reform (Miller 2014, pp. 3, 238). To frame this Christian “language of clothing” theologically—i.e., how dress participates in a wider economy of virtue, renunciation, and ecclesial signification rather than as mere “women’s work”, see Ambrosio’s monograph Théologie de la mode (Ambrosio 2021).

The Rule of Saint Benedict established ora et labora—prayer and work—as the twin pillars of monastic existence. For women’s communities, textile production became the paradigmatic form of labora. Decrying idleness as “the enemy of the soul,” Benedict mandates that the community “be occupied with work … If the needs of the place or poverty require that they themselves do the harvesting, let them not be dismayed … for then they are truly monastics” (RB 48). Although the Rule refers to “reaping the harvest”—agricultural labor traditionally aligned with male monastic communities—textile production unequivocally stood at the center of women’s monastic work. As Caroline Walker Bynum has demonstrated, for medieval women, fasting through food and working through textiles functioned as two foundational modalities of spiritual practice through which union with Christ was pursued by way of distinctly gendered bodily experience (Bynum 1987, pp. 14, 122).

Beyond RB 48’s general injunction to labor, the Rule also regulates the monastery’s material economy and craft. It requires careful stewardship of the community’s tools and goods (RB 31) and provides that clothing and other necessities be issued according to need and local conditions (RB 55). It even anticipates in-house production by regulating artisans, who may practice their skills only with the abbot’s permission and under a discipline of humility (RB 57). This institutional framework also aligns textile production with the Rule’s explicit ethical horizon of charity—providing for those in need and distributing goods equitably within the community (RB 4; RB 34)—thus grounding the link between clothmaking, almsgiving, and the formation of communal virtue.

Monastic weaving possessed a fundamentally dual character. Primarily, it served as the foundation for both economic self-sufficiency and charitable works. The cloth, vestments, and altar linens produced through the nuns’ labor not only ensured the community’s material autonomy but were also used in external trade to maintain monastic operations or distributed as alms to the poor, thereby granting these female communities a measure of economic independence and social agency. Furthermore, and more significantly, its deeper import resided in the spiritual realm. Labor, especially textile work, was esteemed as an ascetic discipline—a means to combat the vice of acedia, cultivate the virtue of humility, and enact the communal ideal of communio. It is noteworthy that the ascetical use of textile work was not confined to women. As Smith shows, within the medieval male monastic tradition, sewing functioned as a discipline of humility (self-abasement) and simplicitas. Monks were expected to keep a needle and thread at hand to mend their own habits; monastic authors—among them Caesarius of Heisterbach—could even treat the ever-present needle (acus) as a visible signum virtutis and relate exempla warning brethren who scorned the practice. Far from diluting the sanctity of “woman-weaving,” such male practice enacts its theological logic: when men cultivate humility through labor culturally coded as “feminine,” they underscore that the virtues figured by the “woman-weaving” image—obedience, lowliness, hiddenness—constitute a universal spiritual ideal that transcends biological sex. In Christian monastic culture, therefore, sewing—by women and by men—operates first and foremost as a bodily technique for taming the will and forming a distinctive spiritual ethos (K. A. Smith 2025, pp. 84–85, 91–93). As a longue durée anthropological parallel, Verdier’s ethnography of rural women’s washing and sewing shows how textile-adjacent techniques can function as norm-governed ways of doing, ritually accomplishing social transitions and forming gendered personhood within a shared symbolic order (Verdier 1979, pp. 80–81).

Within the daily rhythm of monastic observance, each gesture of the weaving process was imbued with contemplative meaning. The act of spinning thread symbolized the gathering of distracted thoughts into a single focus upon God; the crossing of warp and weft represented the submission and interlacement of human will with the divine will; and the resulting smooth, finished fabric emblemized a soul rendered obedient, orderly, and at peace. The conversion of repetitive handwork into a disciplined state of embodied focus—at times approaching a trance—accords with Laura Pottinger’s account of “stitching”. As she shows, the repeated gestures of piercing, looping, and pulling integrate “attentive precision” with unthinking repetition, enabling practitioners to enter a near-ecstatic mental state. In this sense, stitching operates simultaneously as a cultivated bodily technique and a distinctive mode of knowledge-making (Pottinger 2024, pp. 7–8). The entire craft was transformed into a sustained, somatic form of prayer, perfectly mirroring the foundational monastic horarium that integrated prayer, sacred reading (lectio divina), and manual labor (RB 48; Gilchrist 1994, pp. 85–88; Hamburger 1998, pp. 320, 323–26, 366–68, 383–84). Therefore, as Anna McKay demonstrates, medieval Marian narratives already stage a textile rule in which “the Virgin spends only three hours in prayer” but “devotes six to her clothwork” so that “she, quite literally, fabricates her own form of devotion” (McKay 2024, p. 113). Building on this insight, monastic “women’s weaving” crystallizes a triad of weaving, virtue, and prayer: as a disciplinary practice, weaving forms and manifests specific virtues—above all humility and obedience—and ultimately channels them toward communion with God. It was through this profound synthesis of material and spiritual production that female monasteries of the medieval period became the most vital and flourishing centers of the “women’s weaving” ideal.

Thus, in contrast to the neidan of Daoism, which internalized “weaving” as a technique for transforming individual qi and blood, Christian textile practice accentuated its dimensions of external discipline and collective charity. Its foremost aim was the taming of the human will, not the transformation of the physical body; the fruits of this labor were directed toward serving others—both God and neighbor—rather than toward self-perfection. Nuns were thus engaged in a dual act: spiritually weaving the “garment of Christ’s virtues”, while materially weaving tangible cloth. Through this singular activity, their bodies, labor, and faith attained a profound unity, yet the ultimate orientation of this synthesis was unequivocally outward and sacrificial. Consequently, “women’s weaving” here moved entirely beyond the metaphorical, becoming a fully embodied and collective spiritual exercise. It simultaneously yielded the material products required for sustaining communal life and the spiritual fruits necessary for nourishing faith, thereby perfectly encapsulating the medieval Christian sacramental worldview that sought to apprehend the divine through the medium of the created, material order.

To conclude, the motif of “women’s weaving” in medieval Christianity evolved into a sophisticated and coherent system. Its foundations lie in Scriptural narratives of divine wisdom and the Incarnation, which patristic exegesis subsequently developed into a central theological metaphor for salvation and the cultivation of virtue. This motif found concrete expression in the hagiographies and visual culture of female saints, emerging as a pivotal element signifying their asceticism, obedience, and mystical encounters. Ultimately, within the structured life of monasticism, it became institutionalized as a daily practice that seamlessly integrated economic subsistence, charitable ethics, and spiritual discipline. The foregoing analysis sketches a sacralized “men-plough, women-weave” order. Theological discourse casts male ploughing and gate-side civic office as decisive, world-sustaining labour, whereas female textile work is fixed within the household and convent, defined as the obedient maintenance of order, bodily modesty, and liturgical service. Visual culture and monastic practice further naturalize and sacramentalize this gendered division of labour, symbolically binding “ploughing” to male public authority and “weaving” to female interiorized virtue, while quietly encoding asymmetrical distributions of agency. The Christian understanding of this motif, forming a stark contrast with its Daoist counterpart, prioritized responsive obedience, the imitation of a divinely ordained order, and the self–discipline attained through humble, physical work. The resulting feminine ideal of sanctity was not that of an active cosmic co-creator, but rather that of the individual who achieved perfection through flawless conformity to a designated role. This divergence prefigures the divergent trajectories and cross-tradition conversations that follow and supplies the guiding thread for our comparison.

4. Change and Consolidation: The Evolutionary Trajectory of the “Women’s Weaving” Motif Across the Medieval Long Duration

Building on the preceding synchronic analyses, this section adopts a diachronic perspective to trace the reconfiguration of the “women’s weaving” motif across the medieval long durée. Although both Daoism and Christianity sacralized women’s textile labor, their evolutionary paths diverged markedly in driving forces, rhythm, and final configuration. By examining each tradition separately before drawing comparisons, this section demonstrates that the image is not a static signifier but a dynamic cultural construct, evolving in tandem with doctrinal reformulations, institutional change—particularly the rise of monasticism—and shifting gender ideologies. This historical mapping provides the essential groundwork for analyzing the common formation mechanisms (Section 5) and deep cultural bifurcations (Section 6) that follow.

4.1. The Internalization and Systematization of the Daoist “Women’s Weaving” Motif

Across the medieval period, Daoist deployments of “women’s weaving” undergo a marked interiorization: the motif moves from a sacral, cosmological narrative to a technical figure for personal somatic–spiritual cultivation, reaching full systematic articulation in neidan.

This paradigm was first consolidated during the Wei–Jin and Northern–Southern dynasties with the rise of the Shangqing tradition. Texts in Daozang repeatedly invoke images such as yunjin zhipei and tianyi to depict the resplendent attire of female immortals such as Xiwangmu and Zhinu, thereby signaling both their sacred status and the auspicious qualities of the celestial realms they inhabit. At this stage, the motif is oriented primarily toward external cosmological functions: the weaving of these female immortals—or the celestial garments thereby produced—constitutes a crucial activity for sustaining the radiance of heaven, configuring sacred spaces (palaces, processional regalia), and marking gradations within the immortal hierarchy. Through cunsi of these female immortals and the sumptuous garments and creative acts they symbolize, ordinary practitioners could attune themselves to the divine and thereby obtain wisdom and longevity. The weaving site—often overlapping with the cultivation spaces of nüxing zhenren 女性真人 (female perfected)23—is thus construed as a sacred locus where human and divine realms converge (S. Jia 1988, vol. 18, pp. 22–24). By contrast, imagery paired with male ploughing—for example, zhongyu 種玉 (sowing jade)24 and gengzhitian 耕芝田 (ploughing the zhi (lingzhi) field)—also emerged, but it seldom attained the symbolic density or sacral valence of women’s weaving. These motifs functioned largely as tropes of otherworldly abundance and had not yet been tied in any sustained way to practices of male somatic cultivation.

During the Sui through the High Tang, with the rise of Chongxuan 重玄 (Twofold Mystery)25 thought and early neidan ideas, Daoist discourse gradually developed an interpretive framework that shifted from an external cosmology to an interior regimen of body–mind cultivation. As a major Sui–Tang intellectual current, Chongxuan (Twofold Mystery) articulates an apophatic, two-stage strategy that loosens conceptual attachment by moving beyond both “being” (you) and “nonbeing” (wu), thereby transcending binary oppositions; this provided an important intellectual backdrop for later Daoist inward gongfu centered on the body and vital destiny, against which neidan discourse could appropriate and rework cosmogenic topoi, including the “women’s weaving” motif discussed in this article (Kohn 2010, pp. 37–38, 40; Assandri 2009, pp. 98–99). In this context, the Huangting corpus and related inner-visualization scriptures depict the body’s physiological–numinous structure as a subtle yet visually articulable inner field: the rising and descending of the channels and viscera, and the opening, closing, ingress, and egress of qi 氣, are inscribed as an “inner landscape” of palaces and tiered pavilions, mountains and rivers, grottoes and caverns. Texts such as the Taishang huangting neijing yujing thereby present an internal logic of circulation that readily lends itself to later neidan rereadings: subsequent alchemical authors often interpret the ascent and descent of organ-spirits and the transformations of qi in these texts as a precursive form of zhoutian 周天 circulation and the condensation of jing–qi–shen (Taishang Huangting neijing yujing 1988–1992, DZ 331, Daozang, vol. 5, pp. 908–12; Shangqing housheng daojun lieji 1988–1992, DZ 442, Daozang, vol. 6, pp. 686–93). Within the analytical frame adopted here, this series of highly elongated, densely woven inner–body depictions furnishes key resources for internalizing cosmogenic motifs such as “women’s weaving” as metaphors for somatic–energetic operations: the channels can be read as warp and weft, and qi–xue as shuttling threads, while the telos of cultivation is to “weave” within the body an indestructible true garment or shengtai, in ways that converge with recent studies on Daoist corporeality and the “inner landscape” of shanshui 山水 (Liu 2022, pp. 8–11).

By the late Tang and into the early Song, as neidan doctrine matured, the motif of “women’s weaving” underwent its fullest interiorization and technical codification. Canonical formulations coalesced around texts such as Cuigong ruyao jing zhujie 崔公入藥鏡註解 (J. Wang 1988–1992) and Zhonglü chuandao ji 鍾呂傳道集 (Zhonglü chuandao ji 1988–1992). The field generally identifies this period as the decisive phase in which the neidan paradigm assumed a fully systematized form (Baldrian-Hussein 1996, pp. 15, 42–46). Within this schema, “women’s weaving” functions as a master trope for phases such as lianqi chenshen 煉氣成神 (refining qi to transmute into shen). It is embedded in a broader system of dandao gongyi xue 丹道工藝學 (the art of internal alchemy), set in parallel with the metaphors of smelting—lianjing chenqi 煉精成氣 (refining jing to transmute into qi)—and irrigation—yuye huandan 玉液還丹 (jade fluid returning to the elixir). Together, these motifs articulate a sequential technical chain of cultivation procedures (Zhonglü chuandao ji 1988–1992, DZ 263, Daozang, vol. 4, pp. 673–75, 961). This tendency to conceptualize cultivation as a finely wrought craft accords with the “technical turn” of neidan. As Livia Kohn emphasizes, late-medieval Daoism came to treat the body as a site of qi-work, where transformation proceeds through programmed procedures—longevity practices, circulations of qi, and the energy refinement characteristic of internal alchemy—so that the “women’s weaving” topos shifts from a romanticized sacred narrative to a systematized technique of the body (Kohn 2021, pp. 1–2).

From the Song–Yuan period onward, neidan treatises build on this groundwork to further systematize these patterns of energetic circulation and inner corporeal schemata into a full-fledged technical vocabulary and regimen of practice. They regularly deploy formulae such as heche yunzhuan 河車運轉 (the Waterwheel turning) and zhen qi shangliu 真炁上流 (true qi rising upward) to summarize the reversal and ascent of inner qi along the “lesser zhoutian” (小周天), and images such as jinsi guanding 金絲貫頂 (golden threads passing through the crown) and zhiluo danjin 織絡丹錦 (weaving a brocade of cinnabar) to figure the weaving of alchemical substance into brocade-like density within the bodily network of channels and collaterals (see, e.g., Taishang laojun neidan jing 太上老君內丹經, DZ 638, Daozang; Zhonglü chuandao ji, DZ 263; Ruyao jing 入藥鏡, Daozang jiyao JY 142), thereby, in the Song–Yuan and especially in the Ming–Qing alchemical corpora, translating earlier Shangqing and Huangting–style inner visualizations into highly schematized disciplines of psychosomatic cultivation (Skar and Pregadio 2000, pp. 464–97; Pregadio 2024, pp. 7–8, 82–83). This visual and rhetorical repertoire is preserved in concentrated form in the Zhengtong Daozang 正統道藏, above all in the Huangting scriptures and the tradition of inner-body and visceral diagrams—for example, the Taishang huangting neijing yujing (Taishang Huangting neijing yujing 1988–1992, DZ 331, Daozang, vol. 5, pp. 908–12), the Tang Huangting neijing wuzang liufu buxie tu attributed to Hu Yin (Shangqing housheng daojun lieji 1988–1992, DZ 442, Daozang, vol. 6, pp. 686–93), and the Huangting inner-visualization and visceral charts embedded in the Xiuzhen shishu 修真十書 (Zhonglü chuandao ji 1988–1992, DZ 263, Daozang, vol. 4, pp. 835–43)—and, after the Song–Yuan, gradually converges with the “inner shanshui” schemata (e.g., the Neijing tu 內經圖 and Xiuzhen tu 修真圖), producing increasingly refined cartographies of the body as a microcosm of the cosmos (Schipper and Verellen 2004, p. 402; Liu 2022, pp. 9–11). Over this longue durée of rewriting, the “women’s weaving” topos—on the reading proposed here—no longer denotes only the cosmological functions of celestial female deities, but can also be understood as a craft-like process of “weaving” within the body an indestructible true garment or shengtai, thereby emerging as a key metaphor and operative paradigm in Daoist body-centered theology and cultivation.

4.2. The Institutionalization and Ethicalization of the Christian “Women’s Weaving” Motif

The Christian trajectory of the “women’s weaving” motif unfolds along a path distinct from its Daoist counterpart. It begins in early allegorical exegesis,26 where textile labor is framed theologically; it is then personalized in hagiography as a visible marker of women’s sanctity; and it ultimately becomes institutionalized and moralized within monastic life, where it functions as a core discipline that fashions the female body and forms the interior life.

Patristic authors—above all Origen, Jerome, and Augustine—constructed the theological matrix in which “weaving/spinning” acquires its meaning. Drawing on Proverbs 31’s “capable wife” and on the tabernacle craftsmanship of Exodus, Origen’s spiritual reading of weaving and the veil provides a paradigmatic case in which textile work signifies the cultivation of virtue, the upbuilding of the Church, and the mystery of the Incarnation (Origen 1982, Hom. Exod. 13.3–4). In admonitory correspondence to women, Jerome explicitly recommends weaving and spinning as daily exercises for preserving virginity and overcoming idleness (Jerome, Ep. 107.10). Complementing this symbolic register, Augustine’s De opere monachorum offers a sustained defense of bodily labor as monastic discipline ordered to resisting idleness and forming virtue, thereby furnishing the ethical scaffolding for patristic textile metaphors (Augustine 1900, De opere monachorum 30. 38–39). Taken together, these sources indicate that in the earliest phase the motif’s theological valence outweighed its immediate practicality, operating chiefly as an instrument through which male clerical elites instructed and exhorted women’s spirituality.

Between the sixth and eighth centuries, the spread of Western monasticism and the flourishing of hagiographical writing translated the motif from abstract doctrine into embodied sanctity. In Merovingian vitae such as The Life of Saint Radegund and The Life of Saint Bathild, spinning, sewing, and other domestic labors mark queens and aristocratic women as deliberately practicing humilitas and asceticism. The Vita Eustadiola shows the abbess “working with her maids” and making “holy vestments, precious altar cloths and hangings” (McNamara et al. 1992, p. 108), while the Vita domnae Balthildis praises Bathild as an “example of great humility from her servile activity” who urges her sisters “especially to take care always of the poor and strangers with the greatest eagerness” (Fouracre and Gerberding 1996, pp. 128–29). As Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg succinctly puts it, these “holy women and the needle arts” integrate textile handwork into a regimen that subdues the will and disposes the mind to contemplative prayer (Schulenburg 2009, pp. 100, 108). At this stage, the ascetical and moralized inflection of “women’s weaving” intensifies and becomes tightly coupled with female sanctity. Building on Schulenburg, Anna McKay offers a sharper critique: as she notes, “holy clothworking women recur in well-known religious texts from the later Middle Ages” and in these narratives “the use of textiles to elevate sensory, haptic devotion … simultaneously celebrates and prioritises the female autonomy” marginalised by the medieval church (McKay 2024, pp. 69–70). On this basis, recurring textile-work scenes operate as a literary–ideological apparatus that visually binds bodily enclosure, manual labor, and interior virtue, fashioning an emulable paradigm of the saintly weaver for spiritual discipline.

During and after the Carolingian Renaissance, the broad adoption of the Rule of Saint Benedict across European monasteries—women’s communities included—recast weaving within the disciplinary architecture of ora et labora. What had been an individual devotion was recalibrated as a communal, institutional regimen of sanctification. Chapter 48 of the Regula specifies the allocation of time for manual labor and for reading, establishing the normative balance that structures the monastic day (RB 48). Scholarship further notes that women’s houses routinely integrated needlework and the making of liturgical textiles (altar frontals, vestments) into convent life: such works directly served the liturgy and were recorded as significant donations in church inventories and memoria, while also providing material support for the community. Owing to its seated concentration and repetitive rhythm, textile labor was likewise commended as a remedy for idleness and as a school for contemplative prayer (Schulenburg 2009, pp. 84–85, 103).

In contrast to Daoism, therefore, the principal impetus behind the Christian development of this motif is exogenous. The creation and diffusion of monastic institutions demanded a comprehensive discipline of daily life, and textile labor—already marked as a traditional women’s occupation—was readily appropriated and reshaped as a central component of that system. The motif’s evolution is thus outward-facing, institutionalized, and moralized; it ultimately serves communal stability, economic self-sufficiency, and social charity, orienting the practice toward a collective economy of salvation.

4.3. Evolution in Comparative Perspective: Commonalities and Distinctions

Having sketched, in the previous two sections, the respective medieval Daoist and Christian trajectories of the “women’s weaving” motif, this section proceeds with a side-by-side comparison to identify both common trends and fundamental divergences in their development. This synchronic comparison seeks to bring the contours of the problem into sharp relief and to lay a foundation for probing both the shared conditions of emergence and the deep roots of their divergent trajectories.

First, across this extended period, both traditions display a conspicuous convergence in the evolution of the “women’s weaving” motif. (1) Systematization and sacralization. On both sides of Eurasia, an image rooted in secular labor was gradually reorganized from scattered, concrete depictions into a symbol system densely packed with layered metaphors and integrated into core doctrines. In Daoism, it moved from the sacred activity of nüxian to a core technical metaphor for the transmutation of jing–qi–shen within neidan. In Christianity, it advanced from a scriptural emblem of virtue to a typological prefiguration of the mystery of the Incarnation and to the heart of monastic spiritual discipline. This shared trajectory suggests that a deep theological elaboration and practical deployment of “women’s weaving” was, independently, a deliberate choice within both religious systems in the medieval period. (2) Tight coupling with the construction of women’s religious roles and authority. The very history of the image’s transformation is, in effect, a history of the making of female sanctity. In Daoism, nüxian and nüzhen—and in Christianity, holy women and nuns—derive and display religious value through an action inextricable from weaving; the image becomes a primary vehicle for defining and expressing women’s sanctity.

More consequential, however, are the fundamental divergences the two traditions exhibit in both trajectory and telos. Daoism’s arc is characterized by pronounced interiorization and technification: it moves from a cosmological register—where nüxian weave yunjin tianyi 雲錦天衣 (cloud-brocade heavenly robes)27 for the celestial court—to a somatic imaginary in which the adept “weaves” within the body an imperishable shengtai. This culminates in the systematic techniques of neidan, a micro-level regimen oriented to the transformation of individual life. By sharp contrast, Christianity trends toward institutionalization and ethicization: grounded first in allegorical exegesis of the “capable wife” passage in Prov 31:10–31, elaborated through hagiography in which female saints enact humility through textile labor, and ultimately stabilized within the monastic regime as a collective discipline and ethical code emphasizing obedience, industry, and charity.

This core divergence is also legible in the corresponding development of the “male ploughing” motif and its symbolic relation to “women’s weaving.” In Daoism, metaphors of xintian gengdao 心田耕道 and dantian zhongyao 丹田種藥28 deepen alongside inner-alchemical theory, yet they never rival “women’s weaving” in cosmological height, semantic richness, or systemic reach; they function chiefly as metaphors at the level of technical cultivation. In Christianity, by contrast, “men’s ploughing” is typically aligned with Adamic toil after the Fall, with monastic agriculture, and with the soteriological meaning of “sweat” (punishment transfigured into redemption). Its theological elaboration leans toward worldly subsistence and eschatological figures (e.g., sowing and reaping), whereas “women’s weaving” concentrates on interior order, the formation of virtue, and intimate association with the central salvific mystery of the Incarnation. The result is a sharply gendered symbolic division of labor. This asymmetry underscores the distinctive status of “women’s weaving” within both symbolic systems and indicates that the absorption of secular divisions of labor into religious signification was an agentive act of sacralization rather than a simple mirror of social practice.

In sum, across the medieval longue durée, the motif of “women’s weaving” was profoundly reworked and stabilized in both Daoist and Christian contexts, yet along sharply divergent arcs: Daoism articulates an immanent mode of transcendence: a technical path of inner transformation whose sacrality is grounded in—and effected through—micro-techniques of the body. By contrast, Christianity elaborates an external mode of transcendence: an institutionally embedded, ethically inflected regime in which salvation turns on obedient conformity to an objective order established by God and secured by ecclesial structures. This typology, clarifying both commonalities and distinctive profiles while demonstrating the comparative heuristic yield, furnishes a precise, high-tension analytic frame for what follows: a reconstruction of the traditions’ shared socio-cultural substratum and the deep theological–institutional roots of their subsequent divergence.

5. Common Soil: The Motif of “Women’s Weaving” in Economy, Gender, and Symbolic Cognition

Having analyzed the rich configurations of the “women’s weaving” image in medieval Daoism and Christianity, respectively, this section addresses a fundamental question: why did two high traditions, developing largely independently at opposite ends of Eurasia, elevate a secular form of women’s labor to the status of a core religious metaphor?

5.1. Economic Foundations: The “Men’s Ploughing and Women’s Weaving” Mode and the Family-Based Unit of Production

Medieval China and Europe were both built upon an agrarian economy that took the household as its primary unit of production. Within this system, the “men’s ploughing and women’s weaving” model constituted the essential division of labor for social reproduction. The Hanshu (“Shi huo zhi” [Treatise on Food and Money]) 《漢書·食貨志》 articulates a foundational dictum: “If one man does not plough, someone will go hungry; if one woman does not weave, someone will go cold (一夫不耕，或受之飢；一女不織，或受之寒)” (Ban 2016, vol. 4, p. 1228). This inextricably links textile production to livelihood and state governance. This link was institutionalized in the Tang fiscal system, where silk and cloth served as the tiao 調 (cloth tax/textile levy) tribute, a direct reflection of women’s weaving contribution to the state treasury Xin Tang shu 新唐書 (New Book of Tang) (Ouyang and Song 2013, vol. 5, juan 51). As Francesca Bray argues, in China down to the late-imperial era, textile production constituted the core of women’s work, intricately embedded in household reproduction and in the fiscal apparatus of the state (Bray 1997, p. 5). Similarly, in Europe—from the Roman villa economy to the medieval manor—women’s textile labor was crucial for clothing the household and fulfilling seigneurial obligations. The economic historian David Herlihy notes that throughout the early Middle Ages, textiles represented the most typical form of opera muliebria and were an indispensable pillar of the domestic economy (Herlihy 1990, pp. 28–29).

Given this shared economic substrate, textile production constituted the most pervasive and foundational form of women’s work in premodern societies. It is therefore unsurprising that, in seeking to invest everyday life—including that of the majority of women—with ultimate significance and to craft symbols with broad resonance, both Daoism and Christianity turned to this repertoire. The digital reanimation of the Chaoyuan Tu maidens’ vesture as sacred materiality is achieved through the meticulous parameterization of physical properties—including fabric thickness, grammage, and surface effects like silk lustre and woven-gold brocade. Consequently, this process elucidates how the “women’s weaving” topos, while rooted in tangible practice, is systematically transformed into a complex framework of spiritual symbolism (Wang et al. 2024, pp. 9–10). The sacralization of women’s weaving primarily elevates a life-sustaining labor to the register of transcendence and, at the level of ideology, helps underwrite the ideal of a household-based, self-sufficient agrarian economy. This convergence clarifies why both traditions independently selected this form of labor as a privileged site of theological elaboration. However, this economic base was anything but neutral. From the outset, it was folded into gendered power structures, through which it accrued distinctive ethical and religious valences.

5.2. Gender Order: Patriarchal Virtues and the Sacralization of the Neiyu 內域 (Domestic Sphere)29

“Men’s ploughing and women’s weaving” is not merely an economic arrangement; it encodes a comprehensive gender ideology that sharply differentiates social space and role—men oriented to the “outside,” women to the “inside”. Whether in China—where Ruism (Confucianism) such as the sancong side 三從四德 (three obediences and four virtues) structured expectations—or in Europe—shaped by Greco-Roman legacies and patristic thought—women’s value and virtues (diligence, chastity, obedience) were anchored in the household (oikos). As the paradigmatic form of domestic labor, textile production readily served as the most immediate, material instantiation of feminine virtue—fugong 婦功 (women’s work)30.

Religious sacralization of “women’s weaving” thus functions as a deliberate response to—and consecrating consolidation of—this patriarchal order. By linking women’s daily textile work to cosmic creation (Daoism) or sacred redemption (Christianity), religious discourse furnishes a transcendent justification for the gendered division of labor. This is not simple replication, however, but active elevation and incorporation. As Pierre Bourdieu argues, dominative orders often secure reproduction through symbolic violence—that is, through the misrecognition by the dominated, who accept the order as natural, even sacred (Bourdieu 2001, pp. 34–35). By hallowing secular labor with the aura of sacrality, religious symbolism effectively integrates women into the cosmological and soteriological framework. As Anna McKay’s case study shows, hagiographic and devotional writing deploy textile scenes as a literary-ideological apparatus that yokes clothwork to humility, obedience, and enclosure—affecting a sacralized codification and textual hardening of gender norms. In this frame, pious weaving becomes a practice through which women unwittingly reproduce and stabilize the virtues prescribed by patriarchal order (McKay 2024, pp. 112–15, 125, 137, 259). This, in turn, accounts for the persistent feminization of the women’s weaving motif across traditions and its tight coupling with the neiyu and virtue. In effect, it furnishes women with a pathway to enact religious values from within socially prescribed roles. Patriarchy invested women’s weaving with a gendered social valence. That this valence could be so readily taken up and transfigured within religious systems rests on a native affinity between textile practice and basic human structures of symbolic cognition and embodied—indeed contemplative—discipline.

5.3. Symbolic Roots: The Metaphoric Affordances of Weaving and Its Embodied Practice

Beyond socioeconomic structures, the cross-cultural prevalence of the “women’s weaving” image is rooted in universal modes of symbolic cognition and a profound affinity between religious practice and bodily labor. As a fundamental human craft, weaving provides a naturally rich reservoir of religious metaphors. For a contemporary reflection on fabric-like networks and “material intelligence” that helps clarify why textile metaphors travel so easily across domains, see Tripaldi and de Giuli (2022).

First, weaving is a paradigmatic symbol of the transformation of disorder into order. As Gilbert Durand notes, the symbolic imagination is motivated by “dominant reflexes and primordial gestures” and organizes itself around “the postural and digestive reflexes” (Durand 1999, pp. 43, 56–58). The very process of gathering scattered fibers into a structured, patterned fabric is fundamentally isomorphic with the emergence of cosmic order from chaos, the integration of a scattered soul, and the weaving of social cohesion from individuals. This metaphorical affinity—grounded in the very nature of the activity—has cross-cultural purchase and is borne out within particular intellectual traditions. Zürn’s study of the Han-period Huainanzi shows that its compilers self-consciously model the work’s intertextual architecture as a weaving process: by invoking Dao as a cosmic weaver who “holds and links the warp and weft of the universe” and “links the thousand branches and myriad leaves,” the text aims to emulate the Dao’s connective and generative powers in an all-embracing textual fabric (Zürn 2020, pp. 391–92). This case strongly suggests that the cognitive schema of “weaving as an archetype of order-making” was already embedded in early Chinese thought. This inherent structural resonance explains the metaphor’s effortless portability across domains: cosmogony (the creation and maintenance of the world), soteriology (the formation of the soul), and community (the binding of members). Daoism deploys it to articulate the Dao’s generation of the myriad things and the practitioner’s interweaving of jing, qi, and shen; Christianity utilizes it to speak of God’s creative order, the Church as the body of Christ, and the “weaving” of a robe of virtues for the soul. This practice-grounded, activity-intrinsic metaphorical affinity furnishes the cognitive substrate that renders the motif of “women’s weaving” readily legible and adoptable across religious traditions spanning diverse civilizations.

Second, the labor of weaving shares a profound structural homology with the somatic and mental states essential to religious discipline. Weaving constitutes a repetitive bodily practice, demanding intense concentration and patience. The specific bodily techniques involved—requiring psychosomatic coordination, sustained focus, and rhythmic regularity—directly parallel the spiritual states of quiescence, undivided attention, and steadfastness cultivated in Daoist cunsi and neidan practices, as well as in Christian contemplative prayer. As Marcel Mauss puts it, “techniques of the body” are “the ways in which from society to society men know how to use their bodies” (Mauss 1973, p. 70); this notion illuminates the intrinsic link between physical habitus and spiritual state. McKay demonstrates that, within Christian devotion, the cadenced repetitions of spinning and weaving are construed as a bodily technique for training attention. Commenting on the Old English Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, she notes that Mary “set herself a holy rule” that combines hours of prayer with hours at her weaving, so that “she, quite literally, fabricates her own form of devotion” (McKay 2024, pp. 112–13). Thus textile labor, by disciplining the body in order to school the will, becomes a sustained, embodied practice of contemplative prayer. Historical sources frequently note that female transcendents achieved spirit-communion during weaving, just as Christian holy women wove continuous prayer into their textile work. Consequently, the loom itself could be sacralized as a site of practice, transforming “weaving” from a mere external metaphor into a fully embodied discipline that grounded religious ideas in sensory experience.

In summary, the cross-cultural resonance of the “women’s weaving” image is a multilayered phenomenon, co-determined by factors spanning from material base to symbolic superstructure. A shared agrarian foundation—the family-based “men’s ploughing and women’s weaving” economy—supplied the indispensable material precondition and social necessity for the image’s emergence. A common patriarchal order—which anchored women’s value and virtues within the interior sphere—dictated the image’s gendered attributes and social function. Finally, shared modes of symbolic cognition and embodied experience—the innate metaphoric affordances of weaving and its homologies with religious practice—explain, at the deepest level, why this particular form of labor, above others, so powerfully and universally animated the religious imagination across Eurasia. Beyond mapping structural layers, the section’s chief contribution is comparative: it shows how a seemingly ordinary material practice can function as a hinge, binding together a durable economic base, a finely tuned gender regime, and transcendent aspiration. In turn, it clarifies a common logic of symbol formation in premodern high religious traditions: symbols are not minted ex nihilo but forged—through sacralizing craft—from everyday human experience into meaning systems capable of deep, wide resonance. It was the convergence of these deep structural similarities that allowed the “women’s weaving” image to become an enduring bridge connecting the religious worlds of two seemingly distant civilizations.

6. Divergent Paths: Probing the Roots of Different Interpretations of the “Women’s Weaving” Motif

Despite shared economic, social, and cognitive substrates, medieval Daoism and Christianity ultimately configured the motif of “women’s weaving” along two paradigmatic trajectories. Daoism privileges an agentic model of nurturing and generation, which culminates in patterns of internalization and technologization; Christianity, by contrast, foregrounds responsive obedience, leading to institutionalization and ethicalization. This section argues that the divergence originates in opposed cosmologies and theological cores and is subsequently reinforced by divergent conceptions of the body and soteriology as well as by distinct church-state arrangements and institutional settings.

6.1. Intellectual Roots: Cosmology’s Fundamental Divide—Huasheng vs. Creation

The divergence in interpreting the “women’s weaving” motif originates, first and foremost, from the fundamental opposition between the cosmological models of Daoism and Christianity—a distinction that determined the very nature of “creation” and the status of the feminine principle within it.

The bifurcation in interpreting “women’s weaving” begins with fundamentally different cosmological models. As noted above, Daoist cosmology articulates an ever–generative doctrine of huasheng lun: the world is not the artifact of an external, personal Creator but the continuous unfolding of Dao through the immanent interaction, flux, and differentiation of yin-yang qi 陰陽二氣. On this immanentist, non-personal horizon, the cosmos is conceived as an organic, living whole, and so-called “feminine” principles—yin/ci 雌/pin—are affirmed as intrinsic, agentic powers of generation. In such a framework, women’s textile labor—transforming loose fibers into ordered fabric—is isomorphic with the Dao’s mode of generation. The weaving of nüxian is not a deferential response to external command but a natural manifestation of the cosmos’s vital force, a creative practice marked by subjectivity. Regarding its theoretical underpinnings, the symbolic nexus of “weaving-generation” finds a solid cosmological foundation in early Daoist cosmogony. As Norman J. Girardot argues, the hun-tun chaos myth presents the Tao’s “dynamic chaotic order, or chaosmos” as “a cyclic pattern of creative activity or life-giving force” (Girardot 1983, pp. 43, 55), which we may schematically summarize as a movement of Chaos–Differentiation–Return.

By sharp contrast, Christian cosmology is grounded in the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. For Thomas Aquinas, “creation” is not a change within pre-existing matter but the conferral of esse itself—the production of the whole substance without presupposing any subject (Aquinas 1920, ST I, q. 45). Aquinas further argues that this dependence on the Creator would obtain even if the world lacked a temporal beginning (Aquinas 1920, ST I, q. 46). God is wholly other and personal; the world is the free product of the divine will and Word (Gen 1:1–31). Between Creator and creation yawns an ontological gulf. Within this transcendent horizon, the value of human labor, including weaving, derives not from its inherent process but from its ordered response to and glorification of the Creator. The weaving of the “capable wife” in Proverbs 31 signifies her fear of the Lord (Prov 31:19, 21–22); and in the mystery of the Incarnation, Christian tradition frequently represents Christ’s human nature as “woven” in Mary’s womb (Prot. Jas. §§10–12)—yet the theological center is Mary’s obedient fiat, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). Accordingly, the Christian deployment of the image privileges responsive obedience over cosmological generation. As Catherine Keller observes, the dogma of creatio ex nihilo “reflects the unquestionable presupposition of faith in an omnipotent Creator and Lord,” so that “creative processes in matters natural, social and textual are thus also read as functions of power and order” (Keller 2003, p. 2). By contrast, she explicitly proposes a creatio ex profundis—“creation out of the watery depths”—“as an alternative to the orthodox power-discourse of creation from nothingness” and “a figure of the bottomless process of becoming”(Keller 2003, p. 2), a move that resonates with process-inflected and Daoist-adjacent emphases on creatio continua or continuous, co-creative creation. Recent scholarship shows that medieval Christian devotion frames women’s spinning and weaving within a theological grammar of response and obedience. As Anna McKay notes, Mary Aikenhead can sum up her sisters as “ignorant women” who “do nothing but spin and obey” (McKay 2024, p. 1), crystallizing a logic in which “women’s weaving” functions narratively as responsive rather than originative action (McKay 2024, pp. 45–47, 112–15). Hence the two traditions part ways at first principles: one construes the act as formative agency, the other as obedient response.

6.2. Body and Soteriology: Inner Transformation Versus External Grace

These foundational cosmological differences directly shaped the differing practical orientations of the “women’s weaving” motif concerning perspectives on the body and soteriology, accounting for why one tradition inclined towards “technologization” while the other developed along a path of “ethicization”.

Daoism—especially with the medieval rise of neidan—develops a microcosmic body: the human body, infused with the essences of Heaven and Earth, can be refined back to the Dao through specific techniques of the body (G. Zhang 2001, p. 2). Within this context, “women’s weaving” is internalized as a precise cultivation metaphor: the jingluo corresponds to warp and weft; qi and blood shuttle like threads; governed by shen, the adept “weaves” an imperishable shengtai/shenyi 神衣 (spirit-robe) within. Such garment imagery recurs in the Shangqing corpus—for example, in the Huangting Neijing jing. Due to the correspondence between their physiological cycles and the rhythms of yin and yang, women were often endowed with unique advantages for inner cultivation in Daoist discourse. Key tenets of nüdan, such as transforming blood into qi and the cessation of menstruation, were particularly emphasized (Despeux 2000, pp. 406–7). Geng’s recent work sharpens the gendered focus of nüdan: techniques such as zhan chilong regulate specifically female physiology (e.g., menstruation) to redirect processes from houtian 後天 (postnatal) yin toward xiantian 先天 (primordial) yang, aiming at greater bodily agency and spiritual transcendence (Geng 2025, pp. 2–3, 5; see also Huang and Geng 2023, p. 4). Philosophically, this presupposes the symbolic axiom that “every woman is a goddess”: the female body is the goddess’s own body, and its reproductive energy manifests divine creativity (Huang and Geng 2023, p. 1). On this ontological basis, the Daoist maxim wo ming zai wo bu zai tian 我命在我不在天 acquires ascetical concreteness: the body is treated as an alchemical crucible oriented to qualitative transformation through internally scripted techniques (Geng 2025, pp. 13, 16).

Christian soteriology rests on the doctrines of original sin and divine grace: salvation is not the fruit of self-cultivation but of God’s redemptive work wrought in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Therefore, in sharp contrast to Daoist neidan, which interiorizes “women’s weaving” as a fine-grained bodily technique, Christian engagements with textile practice aim to elicit responsive affect. As Bledsoe shows, the tactile charge of cloth is marshalled to school “feminine” compassion and penitence; its telos is ethical penitential introspection, not the internal energetics of sacral self-formation (Bledsoe 2021, pp. 72, 74, 76–77). The same logic extends to male monastic sewing: for monks, sewing functioned less as a technology of interior transformation than as an outward, relational obedience—at once submission to the rule and concrete charity toward the brethren (K. A. Smith 2025, pp. 85, 89, 93). Taken together, Christian textile practices—female and male—inscribe an ethic of response and communal integration within a given divine order. Accordingly, the textile imaginary, whether borne by women or men, ultimately signifies obedience to the transcendent will of God rather than an individuated process of sacral becoming.

6.3. Institutional Fields: Church–State Relations and the Shaping of Women’s Religious Space

Distinct theological conceptions subsequently found their institutional vehicles within specific historical and political contexts, thereby consolidating and reinforcing the aforementioned intellectual and practical bifurcation, and ultimately shaping profoundly different spaces for women’s religious life.

In medieval China, relations between Daoism and imperial authority were plural and flexible; Daoist organization rarely formed a centralized hierarchy comparable to the Western Church. This politico-religious space afforded women a degree of latitude. Tang-dynasty Daoist priestesses might reside in palace–temples or mountain convents, whose land allotments and productive labor (including weaving) sustained religious life. As Jinhua Jia notes, “Daoist convents were economically independent, mainly owing to land allotments by the government” (J. Jia 2018, p. 14), while Despeux and Kohn emphasize that Daoist women renunciants “appeared in a variety of roles and contexts” and “develop[ed] responsibility and autonomy far beyond their mainstream sisters” (Despeux and Kohn 2003, pp. 127–28). Such relative economic autonomy, together with the tendency of neidan to construe “women’s weaving” as an individualized technique, buttressed women’s autonomy in religious pursuits.

Across medieval Europe, the Christian Church—the largest landholder and a highly institutionalized polity—stood alongside, and often in tension with, secular kingship in a “two-swords” configuration. Women’s principal religious sphere was tightly circumscribed within the walls of convents (female monasteries). Monastic regulation—above all the Rule of Saint Benedict—offered shelter yet imposed a stringent regime, integrating daily manual labor, including textile work, into the communal horarium and structures of obedience (RB 5; 48). In this setting, women’s weaving became highly institutionalized and disciplinary: less an optional individual practice than a routine obligation of cenobitic life, fixed in time, place, and purpose (self-provision and charity). This institutional discipline likewise shaped literary representation. As McKay shows, devotional and monastic narratives “set [women] a holy rule” in which fixed hours of prayer alternate with hours at the loom, so that they quite literally fabricate their own form of devotion (McKay 2024, pp. 112–13); in this way, the cadenced repetitions of weaving are explicitly construed as a bodily technique for schooling the will and inculcating obedience, anchoring the motif within the disciplinary frame of ora et labora. Archaeological work on monastic material culture likewise shows that textile production formed part of the economic life of many women’s houses. As Roberta Gilchrist notes for double houses such as Haverholme, stone outbuildings “yielded spindle-whorls, bone bodkins and bobbins, possibly representing weaving and bone-working” (Gilchrist 1994, p. 83), yet overall “production of surplus can seldom be demonstrated” (Gilchrist 1994, p. 85). This regime furnished women with organized communal life even as it bound their labor and creativity within obedience to communal rule and service to ecclesiastical authority—thereby translating the theology of obedience into lived practice.

7. Conclusions

This study offers a systematic comparison of the imagery of “women’s weaving” in medieval Daoism and Christianity and brings into focus a striking paradox: two sophisticated traditions, developing largely independently at opposite ends of Eurasia, each elevates a quotidian form of female labor—textile production, typically assigned to the neiyu and categorized as fugong—to a central metaphor for articulating cosmic creation, divine order, and individual salvation. Yet this shared symbolic elevation ultimately bifurcates into a fundamental polarity—active generativity versus responsive submission—reflecting two distinct theological cosmologies and gender ideologies. Framed by the question of what commonalities and particularities in religious thought, gender order, and civilizational trajectories such a cross–cultural resonance reveals, the present analysis offers the following core claims and contributions.

The findings indicate, to begin with, that in both traditions the metaphor of “women’s weaving” received more systematic and theologically elaborated treatment than its counterpart “men’s ploughing”. Furthermore, Daoism and Christianity each instrumentalized the motif to model the ordering of the cosmos, the transformation of individual life, and the maintenance of sacred community. Crucially, this elevation was not a passive reflection of social division of labor but a selective, doctrinally grounded choice: Daoism privileged weaving because its connotations of transformation and generation better resonated with the generative modality of the Dao, whereas Christianity reinforced weaving because it more effectively signified interior order and humble obedience. These patterns illuminate the traditions’ divergent understandings and deployments of the feminine principle and its symbolic valences.

What underwrites both the cross-cultural resonance and the divergence of the “women’s weaving” motif? Three layers are salient. First, the economic base. The household regime of “men plough, women weave”, broadly shared across the medieval world, made weaving the most pervasive site of women’s production and furnished the material precondition for religious symbolization. Second, the gender order. Under patriarchy, women’s value was anchored to the domestic interior; “women’s weaving” thus functioned as a materialized emblem of feminine virtues, such as diligence, chastity, and withdrawal from the public gaze. Its religious sacralization amounted to a form of “transcendence within role”: providing women—and indeed men as well—with a path to construct religious value and authority precisely through gendered labor. This empowerment-in-constraint is crucial for understanding medieval religion–gender dynamics; whether it tends toward self-directed generativity or heteronomous obedience is ultimately shaped by each tradition’s theology and institutions. Third, weaving’s very procedure of ordering—and the sustained somatic and mental focus it demands—mirrors, at a structural level, patterns of cosmogony, integrative self-formation, and contemplative stilling. This intrinsic isomorphism makes weaving an especially apt metaphorical bridge between the secular and the sacred. Taken together, these structural convergences—from economy to gender order to symbolic logic—explain why the motif became a durable connective tissue between the religious imaginaries of the two civilizations, even as their trajectories diverged.

In conclusion, using the micro-lens of “women’s weaving”, this essay advances a cross-cultural inquiry that is both capacious and finely grained. It contends that the telos of comparative work on religious symbolism is not to catalog likeness and difference, but to leverage a shared symbolic “soil” to expose the “geological fault lines” of civilizational value-structures. The parallel emergence—and subsequent bifurcation—of the women’s weaving motif at opposite ends of Eurasia registers two starkly different ultimate answers, offered by Daoism and Christianity, to common human experiences: answers about creation, nature, embodiment, and freedom. In this way, the case demonstrates how micro-iconographic analysis can operate as a precise probe into the core spiritual architectures of a civilization. At the same time, it shows that systematically reconstructing premodern symbols generates a critical genealogy of modern knowledge production, opening its origins and future trajectories to scrutiny.