Taking off on a tangent from previous realities, I begin with some quotes
>pottery using that motif; it isn't good period
>pottery." If anyone said
>something like that to an artisan in the SCA, he'd
>be laughed out of the
>hall or, better yet, simply ignored.
JB> Well, I think we can all agree that some things are
JB> bad pottery, even if
JB> they were done in period --- period potters must
JB> have produced their share
JB> of cracked pots. On the other hand, in that case
JB> we can define bad as "not
JB> useful".
Having played with pottery as an undergrad, I thought I'd see what the
real stuff looked like in period. I found a book titled _Medieval_
Pottery_ in my local library and perused. The conclusion I came to was
that:
Western European pottery during our timeperiod is tacky-looking.
(That excludes the Majolica-ware from Spain or Italy, which has some
nice pieces and some tacky stuff too). In large part, this seemed to
be due to the materials and techniques available. The European clays
are low-fire or terra-cotta style stuff. This doesn't make very sturdy
stuff, so most of what the book had is by and for peasants and the middle-class.
There is some elegant pottery being made during the Middle Ages -- all in the Orient and the Middle-east. They had the stoneware and
porcelain clays, and the Chinese had the fire-brick clay to build a
kiln that would fire these clays to their full potential. They also
developed a nifty kiln which would develop the high temperatures
necessary from a wood fire.
As I recall, the Middle-east just tried to copy the Chinese wares.
They also did not have the stoneware and firebrick clays, they just had
better model to extrapolate from. They approached the Chinese pretty
closely with the supplies they had, and produced some beautiful stuff
as a result.
An amusing sidenote: I was perusing a collection of Oriental pottery at the Dallas Museum of Art, which does modern art and 18th ce furniture pretty well. This particular collection is privately owned, and they
hadn't messed about with the attributions. One bowl was marked as
12th ce Chinese, which I am 80% certain is actually Arabic. It was
a large white bowl with blue inscriptions, in good Chinese style for
that time, but the inscription on the inside bottom of the bowl appeared to be legible Arabic. I'd looked at enough Arabic-letters-used-as-a
-motif-but-don't-spell-anything, and actual inscriptions. I can't read
Arabic, myself, but it didn't have that repetive characteristic that
the non-legible stuff does.
Gwenllian Cwmystwyth
Steppes, Ansteorra
* Origin: Herald's Point * Steppes/Ansteorra * 214-699-0057 (1:124/4229)
