beaker

This beaker is decorated with eight continuous horizontal trails. Four deep blue trails alternate with four almost colorless trails, three of which were pinched to form bands of narrow vertical ridges, while the fourth, at the junction of the wall and the base, has a series of fire-polished “toes.” Vessels of almost colorless glass decorated with deep blue trails were made in several parts of western and southern Europe in the later Middle Ages. Beakers with this type of ornament, however, are rare. Similar objects are in the collections of the Museum für Kunsthandwerk in Frankfurt am Main and the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf, both in Germany. Fragments of another beaker of this type were found in a late 13thcentury context during archaeological excavations at Breisach in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, in 1980. The similar beakers noted above are published in Erwin Baumgartner and Ingeborg Krueger, Phönix aus Sand und Asche: Glas des Mittelalters, Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1988, pp. 182– 183, nos. 149–151.