A medieval Germanic parcel-gilt silver double cup, unmarked, mid-14th century

Excavated at Donauwörth, Germany, circa 1960.

Associated Literature

Gruber, A. and Rapp, A.; Weltisches Silber, Katalog der Sammlung des Schweizerischen Landesmuseum; Zurich, 1977; no.52

The fashionable lady engraved on the previously enamelled disc in the foot has her hair dressed into thick braids at the temple and wears a garment with sleeves that hang ostentatiously from her elbows. Both these features were fashionable in the mid-14th century and can be found in numerous widely spread contemporary illustrations. Such an illustration would include the English psalter written and illustrated between 1320-40 for Sir Edward Luttrell, where an illustrated dinner scene includes such fashionable ladies and a priest drinking from half of a double cup.

A handful of similar cups of this form have survived in museums, their survival largely attributable to being buried or hidden. Their dating to the mid-14th century is supported by four of them being found as buried treasure relating to a specific outbreak of the bubonic plague, which decimated Europe from the summer and autumn of 1348. During this terrible event more than 30 per cent of the European population is thought to have perished, and such was the hysteria that blame fell on certain sectors of the population, including members of the Jewish community who went in fear for their property and life. One such example of buried treasure discovered in September 1998, includes a double cup that can be compared very closely with the present example, in terms of size, identical ornamental borders, shape and position of the handles, also the inclusion of enamel roundels (the fox and crow and the fox and eagle from Aesop’s fables). Part of what is known as the Erfurt treasure, where a massacre of the Jewish population occurred on 22/23 March 1349. That particular double cup appears to have been the property of Kalman von Wiehe, a Jewish financier who owned the house where it was found.

While a number of owners of surviving cups of this type were Jewish, others were Christian. Two cups held in Swiss museums attest to this; one was found in 1606 in the foundations of the Seedorf convent in the canton of Uri Basel (Basel Historisches Museum nr. 1894.265, Fritz) and another with an engraving of St Benedict came from the Benedictine Convent of St. Andreas, Sarnen, (Swiss National museum, Zurich nr. LM 4479, Gruber).