Review by Ivor Noël Hume
Maiolica in the North: The Archaeology of Tin-Glazed Earthenware in North-West Europe c. 1500–1600

David Gaimster, editor. Maiolica in the North: The Archaeology of Tin-Glazed Earthenware in North-West Europe c. 1500–1600. Occasional Paper No. 122. London: British Museum, 1999. 188 pp.; bw and color illus. £25 paperbound.

Any attempt to review a collection of papers delivered at a colloquium is akin to trying to shake hands with an octopus: one doesn’t know with whom to begin or where to focus. Equally baffling is the readership enigma. In the Weld of commercial publishing the first questions asked are (1) who will want to read this book and (2) how many people will buy it? Subsidized publishing, on the other hand, is different. The book doesn’t have to turn a profit, and if the readers are relatively few, at least they will be appreciative. 

I had long supposed that the terms colloquium and symposium were synonymous, but there is a none-too-subtle distinction between them. According to Webster, the latter is a social gathering at which ideas are exchanged or where “specialists deliver short addresses on a topic or related topics.” A colloquium, on the other hand, is a heavy-duty affair whose definition includes neither the words social nor short. The British Museum’s invitation of March, 1997, brought together the top people in their related Welds and lasted two full days.

As a title, Maiolica in the North has a somewhat chilling ring, but between this volume’s pages lies an iceberg of information, a little of it on the surface and much more beneath. Compiled under the editorship of the British Museum’s David Gaimster, sixteen authors combined to address a single century’s production of one ceramic ware from a relatively small region. The result is a study in remarkable depth and of assured durability. 

The tin-glazed wares manufactured in the South Netherlands were first brought to the attention of English-reading curators and collectors by Bernard Rackham in Early Netherlandish Maiolica with Special Reference to the Tiles at the Vyne in Hampshire. The tiles had been discovered in a garden of the Tudor house believed to have been built by Sir William Sandys, who had bought them while serving as Treasurer of Calais and who returned with them in 1522 or thereabouts. At an uncertain date in the nineteenth century, the discovered tiles were relaid in the Chapel at the Vyne, where they remain. Their importance to Rackham, and to John G. Hurst, who discussed them in his colloquium address, was simply stated: These were, and are, the earliest documented tin-glazed tiles found in England, and have a prefatory place in any discussion of the ware, no matter what its form.^[1]

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the shapes were few: vases with or without ring handles, some rather squat and ugly jugs, and waisted pharmaceutical albarelli. Logic dictates that most of the vases and jugs were imported prior to the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1533, being decorated with the sacred YHS monogram peculiar to Catholicism. However, as John Hurst pointed out, the presence of so many fragmentary examples from secular sites may be evidence of private (even heretical?) devotion. Not until much later did Netherlandish production expand to include inferior copies of the elaborately decorated “faienza” dishes that were the glory of North Italian ceramic art in the latter years of the fifteenth century. 

Growing collector interest in early English delftware that began in the late nineteenth century inevitably carried with it curiosity about the genesis of the decoration and the technology of the ware’s manufacture—which, in truth, was Italian and not Dutch. It was out of that interest that Bernard Rackham’s pioneering book was born. Two years earlier, in an equally seminal book, Rackham and his partner Herbert Read published English Pottery and in it addressed the Italian connection. They stated that “Research in archives and the yield of excavations have given us what we may probably regard as the truth of the matter.” As the 1997 papers reveal, modern technology enables us to go much further, littering the way with the carcasses of hitherto sacred cows.^[2]

In an editorial note, David Gaimster grapples with the all-too-familiar problem of misleading terminology and differentiates between style and place of origin. Here Netherlandish is retained to identify the sixteenth-century adaptation of Italian styles and technology into the Spanish Netherlands and the adjoining Dutch Republic. The Netherlands, on the other hand, refers only to the modern sovereignty so named. It can be argued, therefore, that tin-glazed wares produced in the modern Netherlands can fairly be called delftware (with a lowercase d unless attributable to Delft itself), while similar wares produced in what is now Northern France should be called faience. In the sixteenth century, the northern maiolica industry flourished first in the vicinity of Antwerp, and it was from there, in 1567, that the first known maiolica potters emigrated to Norwich in East Anglia and sired the delftware industry that would dominate the tables of middle-class English households throughout the seventeenth century. 

Since the Second World War, much more information has been garnered through archaeology, first as the result of German and Allied bombing, and subsequently by urban renewal programs both in Britain and in Western Europe. That diversity of sources is made manifest by the spread of contributors to this volume, e.g., Jan Baart in Amsterdam, Johan Veeckman on Antwerp, Alejandro Gutierrez at Southampton, John Allan on the West of England at Plymouth and Exeter, John Cotter at Colchester, plus the editor and others on finds from London. 
This reviewer had what is now seen as the privilege (but then the unenviable task) of beginning salvage work on the building sites of post-war London, and there made the first archaeologically controlled recovery of a still important group of Netherlandish-type maiolica. Those three associated pieces came from a chalk-walled cellar on the site of what is now Gateway House on Queen Victoria Street. Consequently, their inclusion in this volume is cause for some small satisfaction—until one discovers that two of them lie among the nomenclaturic carcasses.

Of the three vessels, I followed Rackham in accepting the two small vases as Netherlandish while cautiously describing the jug as being of “Faenza style” on the evidence of a parallel in the Victoria and Albert Museum. One of the vases bore the sacred initials YHS already well known on similar, tin-glazed vases that featured a pair of ring handles. But this example differed, having what are best described as inverted-lobe handles. The second vase was decorated with a stylized peacock feather device and had the same handles. But regardless of their anomalous handles, I would continue to accept the vases as Netherlandish until NAA proved otherwise and the results were published in the colloquium’s seminal paper, “De Nomine Jhesu...&c.,” by Hugo Blake.^[3]

NAA is not, as one colleague suggested, an acronym for Netherlands Automobile Association, but stands for Neutron Activation Analysis. That relatively new process is to ceramic clay what DNA testing is to innocents on death row. It compares the elements found in the body of one pot to those of another from a known kiln site, revealing beyond all argument whether both samples are or are not from the same source. The NAA matches for the Gateway House vases were found not in Antwerp, but in Northern Italy. In the course of the British Museum’s extensive testing, many another hitherto Netherlandish vessel changed its nationality. The impact of this revelation provides the focus for most of the papers contained in this volume, as is indicated by the title of David Gaimster’s introductory essay, “Maiolica in the North: The Shock of the New.” 

Needless to say, NAA is not limited to the re-classification of tin-glazed earthenwares of the sixteenth century. It can be applied to wares of every clay composition and date and requires only that there be an anchoring data base of known origin. Although, in theory, NAA promises to solve most ceramic questions, in reality it is as yet limited to specific questions being asked by specialists who can thereby contribute to their laboratory’s own research. In short, the process is not yet economically available to Aunt Mary, who wants to know whether her heirloom chamber pot really did come from Bideford as family tradition claimed. 

That caveat aside, Maiolica in the North: The Archaeology of Tin-Glazed Earthenware in North-West Europe c. 1500–1600 belongs in the library of every museum and collector having an interest in the evolution of delftware, maiolica, or faience. Four years after the last of the speakers left the podium, one dares to hope that someone among them will be moved to synthesize the colloquium’s shared knowledge into a conventional book that can be read easily and with instruction by all who have an interest in these wares. To the archaeologist, however, the published papers make it very clear that the visual identification of ceramics based on style or osmosis is no longer acceptable. For the time being, at least, we are left fearing that we are wrong, yet helpless to be right. Within this narrow field alone, the class that for generations has been called Early Netherlandish Maiolica has suddenly become Italo-Netherlandish, meaning “we’ll get back to you with one attribution or the other after we can afford to invest in Neutron Activation Analysis.” 
The British Museum Press stands tall among the few subsidized presses able to elegantly publish volumes whose sales do not offset the cost of production and distribution. That this is Number 122 in the Museum’s series of Occasional Papers speaks eloquently for itself. 

Ivor Noël Hume