John Mallett joined the V&A as an Assistant Keeper in 1962. He became Keeper of the Ceramics Department in 1976 until his retirement in 1989. Elisa Sani is currently a Research Fellow at the Courtauld Institute Gallery, London. She has previously held curatorial positions at the Wallace Collection and at the V&A.

• Foreword; Preface; The Place of Maiolica among the Arts of the Renaissance by Caroline Campbell; Archaic Maiolicas in the North, c. 1280–1450 by Hugo Blake; Revisiting Niculoso Pisano (active 1503–1529): Italian Novelties and Iberian Taste by Alfonso Pleguezuelo; Italian-influenced tin-glazed Earthenware of the sixteenth and seventeenth Centuries North of the Alps. More Questions than Answers by Silvia Glaser; Reflections on early Gubbio Lustreware by Elisa Paola Sani; An istoriato Basin fit for a Cardinal by J.V.G. Mallet; Several Seventeenth-century Armorial bianchi Works for Roman and other élite Clients by Michael J. Brody; High-quality Maiolica in the style of Porcelain: Experiments in North Italian Maiolica in its productive final Years by Raffaella Ausenda; Provenance as a Criterion for Attribution: Napoleonic Seizures in Braunschweig and the Maiolica Collection in the Louvre by Françoise Barbe; ‘Deglj Antiquari il Re’: Giovanni Freppa as Dealer, Collector and Forger in nineteenth-century Florence by Dora Thornton; Luigi Girelli, a late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Collector and Draughtsman of Italian Maiolica by Valentina Mazzotti; Fragments, Restoration, Fakes. Some Considerations on the Collecting of Maiolica before 1914 by Lucio Riccetti; Timothy Wilson publications: Renaissance and later Ceramics (and a little Glass); General Bibliography