The internationally important collection of Italian maiolica in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, is based on the collection of the Victorian scholar-collector C.D.E. Fortnum (1820-99). This book is a full catalogue of the Ashmolean’s Italian pottery and also including Spain, France, the Low Countries, England, and Mexico. It presents a panorama of the achievement of Italian potters and pottery-painters, who transformed a technology they learnt from the Islamic world into a vivid form of Renaissance art, which was then diffused across Europe and beyond, creating individual national ceramic traditions.