Simple Ceramics? Design, Decorative Materiality and Anabaptist Pottery in Early Modern Central Europe

This article traces the manufacture and consumption of faience ceramics made by Hutterite communities in central Europe from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The production, use and survival of Anabaptist Haban ware offers insights into the nature of Anabaptist material regimes and communities and into overlapping but distinct communities of consumption and collecting. Hutterite craftsmen were instructed to produce objects ‘in the same way as was always done’, with regulations about uncomplicated designs and colours. Yet faience Haban ware was highly sought after, and decorative items were made for powerful patrons from materials drawn from all over Europe. Such objects have now become associated with specific national ‘folk’ cultures. These distinctive remnants of Hutterite communities in Germany and central Europe problematize the material dimensions of survival, conformity and separatism in Anabaptist communities and give access to the complicated affective properties of the white faience ware that Hutterites produced.