| Summary: | Published to accompany the first exhibition on ceramics of the Middle Ages anywhere for more than 50 years, this beautiful publication aims to demystify medieval art by highlighting the beauty and familiarity of ceramic pots and tiles from all over northern Europe, with an emphasis on 13th to early 16th-century England. Among the highlights presented here are three magnificent examples of the English jug, described in 1948 by the great historian of ceramics W.B. Honey in his Foreword to Bernard Rackham's pioneering book Medieval English Pottery, "quite simply, as the most beautiful pottery ever made in England." Formerly despised for their roughness and lack of superficial refinement, they are now recognized as worthy of comparison for their nobility of form with the early Chinese wares, so much admired today as the finest of all pottery. The Dartford Knight Jug is an example of the most celebrated of all medieval English pottery, dating to the late 13th century and made in Scarborough in Yorkshire. The Rye "Royal Presentation" Jug, excavated from a kiln site in Rye in the 1930s, having laid there since its creation in the 14th century is a remarkable survival decorated in a curious scene of finely scratched sgraffito figures. And a massive shouldered jug from Kedleston Hall was described when it was discovered in 1862 as "probably the most important and interesting early mediaeval relic of Norman pottery which has ever been exhumed". Exhibition: Samm Fogg, London, UK (4.2014).
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