# Hedwig Beaker > Unidentified workshop, attributed to Norman Sicily - 12th century (conventionally dated 1100-1199; precise date and origin disputed) > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/hedwig-glass-workshop-norman-sicily/hedwig-beaker-british-museum/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-23 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unidentified workshop, attributed to Norman Sicily - **Date:** 12th century (conventionally dated 1100-1199; precise date and origin disputed) - **Medium:** Wheel-cut relief glass, brownish tinted with fine bubbles - **Dimensions:** Height 14.00 cm; diameter at rim 14.00 cm; diameter at base 10.80 cm; thickness at rim 0.50 cm - **Object type:** Glass - **Period:** Medieval, Norman Sicily or the eastern Mediterranean, 12th century - **Current location:** British Museum, London - **Attribution:** disputed ## Summary A thick-walled beaker of brownish glass, cut in high relief with an eagle flanked by a lion and a winged griffin, one of only about fourteen complete survivors of a small and much-argued-over medieval type. For a century it was placed with Islamic glassworkers in Fatimid Egypt; in 2005 the glass historian Rosemarie Lierke argued at length for the Norman court of Sicily instead, a case that has won real support without closing the question, since a rival historian has rejected her comparanda point by point and a chemical analysis of a related fragment points back toward the Levant.The type takes its name from Saint Hedwig of Silesia, to whom a fourteenth-century legend attaches a miracle of water turning to wine under her sceptical husband's eyes; no source ties this specific beaker to Hedwig herself, only to the type that carries her name. Its own documented history is short and honest about its gaps: nothing is known of it before 1959, when the British Museum bought it from the London dealer Margaret H. Drey with funds from the Brooke Sewell Bequest.Even how it was made is disputed. The conventional account has the relief ground into cold, finished glass with rotary abrasive wheels; Lierke has proposed instead that it was pressed and turned while the glass was still hot, against a mould made for one use only. Neither the origin nor the technique is settled, and this record treats both as open. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **12th century** Unidentified workshop, attributed to Norman Sicily (attribution disputed; Fatimid Egypt or the Levant remain argued alternatives) `[disputed]` (origin) No document names a maker, patron or place of manufacture. The Norman-Sicilian attribution was set out at length by Rosemarie Lierke in 2005 and has been adopted by a number of specialists and museums since, but it has been rejected on stylistic grounds by Hannes Moehring and sits against compositional evidence from a related fragment pointing to the Levant. This record does not treat either attribution as settled. - **-by 1959** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No owner, collection, exhibition or sale is documented between the beaker's manufacture and its appearance with a London dealer in 1959. This is a genuine, undocumented gap of roughly eight centuries, not an oversight in this record's research. - **by 1959-1959** Margaret H. Drey, London dealer `[documented]` (sale) The British Museum acquired the beaker from the dealer Margaret H. Drey in 1959. How the beaker reached Drey, and from whom, is not stated in the sources consulted. - **1959-present** British Museum, London `[documented]` (acquisition) Purchased in 1959 with funds from the Brooke Sewell Bequest and registered as museum number 1959,0414.1. Percy Thomas Brooke Sewell had died in 1958; the acquisition is credited in the Museum's own records as his gift because it was funded from the bequest he left, though the purchase itself took place after his death. Published by R.H. Pinder-Wilson as 'A Hedwig Glass for the Museum', British Museum Quarterly, 1960. No purchase price was located in the sources consulted. ## Open questions - Where was this beaker between its twelfth-century manufacture and its appearance with the London dealer Margaret H. Drey by 1959? No owner, collection or sale is documented for roughly eight centuries. - Was the relief decoration cut cold with rotary abrasive wheels, as the conventional account holds, or shaped hot against a single-use mould, as Rosemarie Lierke has proposed? The two accounts remain genuinely unresolved against each other. - Was the vessel made in Norman Sicily, as Lierke's 2005 study and much subsequent museum cataloguing holds, or in Fatimid Egypt or the wider Levant, as Hannes Moehring's rebuttal and the 2009 compositional analysis of the Budapest fragment both suggest? No consensus exists in the sources consulted. - Was this specific beaker ever associated, in any documented way, with Saint Hedwig of Silesia herself, or does the association rest entirely on the type's later name and legend? No source consulted claims a documented link between this object and Hedwig in her lifetime or soon after. - What is the relationship, if any, between this beaker and the glass fragment recorded under museum number 1903,0721.3, photographed and displayed alongside it in the Museum's own image series? The connection, if there is one, is not explained in the sources consulted for this record. - Did the vessel's ring foot survive intact into the twentieth century and break afterward, or was it already lost before 1959? No condition record earlier than the Museum's own custody was located. ## Sources - [1] British Museum, collection online, 'beaker', museum number 1959,0414.1. - [2] Wikipedia, 'Hedwig glass'. Tertiary source consolidating the origin-attribution history, the corpus list and the Saint Hedwig legend; flagged for replacement with the primary scholarship it cites (Ettinghausen and Grabar 1987; Wedepohl and Kronz 2009; Lierke 2005). - [3] Discover Islamic Art (Museum With No Frontiers), 'Beaker'. Secondary catalogue entry citing Brend (1991), Tait (1991) and Whitehouse (2002) in its own bibliography. - [4] R.H. Pinder-Wilson, 'A Hedwig Glass for the Museum', British Museum Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 1/2 (1960), pp. 43-45. Consulted via its JSTOR record; full text is paywalled and was not read beyond the citation and abstract-level detail surfaced there. - [5] Siegmar Geiselberger, review of Rosemarie Lierke, Die Hedwigsbecher: das normannisch-sizilische Erbe der staufischen Kaiser (Ruhpolding: Rutzen, 2005), in Pressglas-Korrespondenz, issue 2005-4. - [6] Hannes Moehring, 'Die Hedwigsbecher - Das Raetsel ihrer Herkunft', review of Lierke, Die Hedwigsbecher. - [7] Wikipedia, 'Rosemarie Lierke'. Tertiary source for her biography and the general reception of her work as controversial; flagged for replacement with a scholarly biographical notice. - [8] Rijksmuseum, 'Hedwig beaker', object number BK-NM-712. - [9] Corning Museum of Glass, 'Beaker with Lions (Hedwig Beaker)'. - [10] 'A History of the World in 100 Objects', episode 'Hedwig glass beaker', BBC Radio 4 and the British Museum, presented by Neil MacGregor with David Abulafia and Jonathan Riley-Smith, broadcast 22 June 2010. - [11] Wikimedia Commons, File:Hedwig glass 1.jpg through File:Hedwig glass 7.jpg, photographs by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. - [12] Wikipedia (German), 'Hedwigsbecher'. Tertiary source consulted for cross-checking the corpus list and the absence of a documented textual source for the legend beyond the 1353 court manuscript; flagged for replacement with primary scholarship. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. 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