Stewart contributes chapter to "Animals and Early Modern Identity" book

Stewart contributes chapter to "Animals and Early Modern Identity" book

calendar icon03 Feb 2015    

Alison Stewart
Alison Stewart
Lincoln, Neb.--Hixson-Lied Professor of Art History Alison Stewart contributed a chapter titled “Man’s Best Friend? Dogs and Pigs in Early Modern Germany” in the recently released book, “Animals and Early Modern Identity,” edited by Pia F. Cuneo and published by Ashgate.

The book, including a mention of Stewart’s chapter, was recently reviewed in the Jan. 28 The Times Literary Supplement, London.

Stewart’s chapter addresses dogs before they indicated fidelity. In the 16th century in Germany, dogs and pigs became what Stewart called, “emblems of indiscriminate and gluttonous eating and drinking” at a time when “humanists, along with town and imperial authorities and reformers across confessional [that is, religious] lines, addressed their heightened concern for social issues” (p. 19).

“The animals were part of an attempt to instill manners, on one hand,” Stewart said. “But they also showed the realities of a society in transition toward becoming more civilized, on the other.”

Stewart has taught art history at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln since 1989. She received her Bachelor of Arts in art history and journalism from Syracuse University, her Master of Arts in art history from Queens College of the City University of New York, and her Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University. In 1981 as a graduate student, she received a Fulbright grant to study in Munich. In 2014, she received a Fulbright Senior Lecturing-Research award to teach and complete research at the University of Trier in Germany.

Her recent books include “Media Revolution: Early Prints from the Sheldon Museum of Art,” edited by Stewart and Gregory Nosan in 2012, which is available through the Digital Commons at https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/9/; “Before Bruegel:  Sebald Beham and the Origin of Peasant Festival” in 2008; and “Saints, Sinners and Sisters:  Gender and Visual Art in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe,” co-edited with Jane Carroll, in 2003.