© 2002 by Design History Society
Protestant Pots
Morality and Social Ritual in the Early Modern Home
Bard Graduate Center New York
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Abstract |
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This essay examines the uses of religious and exemplary imagery as decoration for domestic ceramics in sixteenth-century Northern Europe. It considers a number of meanings that imagery, usually derived from prints, might assume from the utilitarian nature of the medium upon which it was applied, and from the context in which it was used. Interest focuses not only on the ways such vessels reflected patterns of social behaviour and change, but also on how the vessels themselves might have played a dynamic role in shaping and conditioning social habits, through the symbolic meanings expressed in the ornament, as well as the uses within the rituals of drinking and dining that their forms and decoration demanded. This occurred on a number of different levels. In reformed communities, ceramic pieces, as pieces of display, became one medium through which to convey ideas of moral instruction central to the Protestant household. Secondly, the great number of religious and exemplary images used to decorate ceramic vessels might be seen as a market response to the increased ritualization of dining habits, in which their presence would reinforce the aura of piety expected of the household and, more specifically, the quasi-sacramental commensality accorded the family meal. Thirdly, the appropriateness of ceramics as a medium for propagandist (particularly anti-Catholic) imagery is examined within the context of drinking and dining rituals, to suggest ways in which drinking vessels, jars and stove tiles functioned as symbols of personal and communal identity, grounded in political or confessional allegiances.
Key Words: ceramics • domestic space • Germany • Renaissance • Reformation • religion