Alison Stewart has a bone to pick with both academic publishers and art-historical scholarship. Although scholarly research demonstrates that painting in the first half of the sixteenth century was one among many artistic media, such as woodblock prints, tapestry, stained glass, metalwork, etc., art historians and publishing houses distinguish painting from the other arts and give preference to it, following an inclination that did not exist in the early modern period. For example, Stewart claims that one could easily deduce from modern literature that Pieter Bruegel the Elder invented the theme of peasant festivities. Bruegel’s paintings of peasants are taken seriously by scholars and publishers alike (by “seriously” Stewart means that they are mined for iconographic meaning and artistic innovation), while the woodblock prints of his German predecessor, Hans Sebald Beham (1500–1550), are understood simply as straightforward didactic moralism. In order to rectify this misconception, Stewart devotes an entire study to the first independent pictures of peasant festivals made in Europe, which were designed by Beham in Nuremberg between 1524 and 1535: Large Kermis, Kermis (Erlangen) , Nose Dance, Peasant Wedding Celebration, and Spinning Bee.

Stewart’s goal is to reassess these images, and Beham as artist, within their immediate cultural context. Turning to literature that addresses peasant festival celebrations, such as poetry, plays, pamphlets, and sermons, as well as legislation by Nuremberg’s town council that sought to limit these events, the author attempts to understand why and under what circumstances the subject emerged in the history of art and how Beham’s contemporary viewers would have responded. In the introduction, Stewart outlines six recurring themes that are woven throughout the book’s eight chapters: 1) Sebald Beham invented the subject of peasant festivals in the visual arts; 2) the woodcut technique played an important role for the peasant festival topic; 3) the adoption of the new Lutheran religion in Nuremberg was essential for the emergence of peasant festivals and their cultural meanings; 4) Beham’s pictures conveyed a complex set of associations and meanings; 5) festival prints represented an intersection of learned and vernacular interests, elite and popular concerns; and 6) the images enjoyed a broad audience that included humanists, merchants, women, and others from across the social spectrum. Rather than offer a chapter-by-chapter analysis, I would like to take up a few of the themes Stewart sets forward in order to address the book’s contents and some of its problems.

Beham was an apprentice to Albrecht Dürer, and his first depiction of peasants was most likely a copy after a study by Dürer. Judging from a self-portrait, it appears that Beham, like his teacher, viewed himself as a man of wealth and status, not as a craftsman. Despite being indicted as a “godless painter,” a reputation he acquired due to his questionable (Spiritualist) theological beliefs, Beham, according to Stewart, was highly skilled and widely praised as an artist. He was also associated with Hans Denck, Sebastian Franck (who was married to Beham’s sister), and Andreas Karlstadt, all of whom were active participants in the radical Reformation and disliked by the Nuremberg city authorities. These reformers rejected all outward religious rituals, particularly the Lutheran understanding of mass, and (Franck in particular) attacked Luther’s failure to cleanse popular culture of its excesses, including inebriation. In his On the Horrible Vice of Drunkenness from 1528, for example, Franck explained that being drunk had become the Bible for many Lutherans (37). It is in this context that one of Beham’s first representations of peasant festivity, Kermis at Mögeldorf (also from 1528), is traditionally understood—as a visual, moral criticism of excess.

But the radical reformers were not the only ones to take a conservative approach to public behavior; Nuremberg’s city council, which had recently instituted Lutheranism as the official religion, was also keen to put a stop to religious rituals and feast days associated with the Catholic faith. These reforming efforts, coupled with the Peasant’s War of 1525, brought both peasants and the festivals they celebrated into prominence. Beham and the publishers he worked with capitalized on these events by experimenting with representations of peasants and their village fairs. The popularity of these images created a market for what would become a new genre in art by the second half of the sixteenth century, both in Germany and the Netherlands.

Stewart’s discussion of the important role of the Lutheran Reformation in Nuremberg highlights criticism of what was deemed to be the carefree and indulgent behavior of kermis participants. For example, on 24 May 1525, the Lutheran city council listed the religious holidays that residents were allowed to celebrate as well as its reasons for reducing their numbers: “Numerous feast days . . . have led to the highest dishonor of God’s holy word because those same numerous feast days were cause for . . . blasphemy, drunkenness, anger, lust, adultery, strife, manslaughter, brawls, and other public and sinful vices” (43). However, whereas Stewart concentrates on the abundance of Reformation literature that reads peasant festivities in a negative, moralizing way, aspects of the larger Reformation movement could also be understood as supporting Beham’s efforts to document these customs and might have been explored more thoroughly.

Although Luther’s protest against the Catholic Church primarily emphasized issues of theology and church practices, the broader horizon of the Reformation offers different perspectives. Regional and local identities were being drastically redefined by a number of factors, including Luther’s translation of the Bible into the vernacular and the ensuing cultivation of the German language; local authorities’ acquisition of land and property from religious institutions; the renunciation of the Pope’s authority and the increasing autonomy of German principalities; and an emerging education system that sought to “reprogram” citizens according to Lutheran, not Catholic, ideas. Rather than concentrating on the moralizing critiques of reformers, Stewart could have broadened her approach to ask how the Reformation helped to create an interest, both for artists and viewers, in documenting local custom and behavior as a means of identity formation. How did the Reformation, particularly Luther’s theology, affect urbanites’ relationship to, and perception of, the land and, by extension, of the individuals who worked it—peasants? The radical Reformation, for which Beham certainly had sympathy, advocated a strategy of reform from below, a transformation of society to the benefit of the lay commoner and local community rather than solely the elite. How might the teachings of radical reformers, such as Thomas Müntzer, Karlstadt, and Denck, have inspired a more nuanced view of peasants and their rural life for Beham and his viewing audience?

This more nuanced relationship between the various strands of the Protestant Reformation and the status and role of peasants in society would have only further substantiated Stewart’s claim that Beham’s pictures conveyed a complex set of associations and meanings. In contrast to previous scholarship by Hans-Joachim Raupp (Bauernsatiren: Entstehung und Entwicklung des bauerlichen Genres in der deutschen und niederlandischen Kunst ca. 1470–1570, Niederzier: Lukassen, 1986), Hessel Miedema (“Realism and Comic Mode: The Peasant,” Simiolus 9 (1977): 205–29), and Keith Moxey (“Sebald Beham’s Church Anniversary Holidays: Festive Peasants as Instruments of Repressive Humor,” Simiolus 12 (1981–82): 107–30), who interpret these images as simultaneously criticizing immoral action and offering instruction for alternate modes of behavior by showing what not to do, Stewart argues that even though Beham’s representations of overt sexual behavior, drunkenness, fighting, and gluttony might seem like caricature, reactions to the peasant festivities varied from viewer to viewer. Since, according to the author, these images enjoyed a broad audience that traversed class, gender, religious affiliation, and educational level, responses could have ranged from disdain to laughter, or even the temptation to throw caution to the wind and take part in the festivities. While it is clear that the town councilors, who wished to eliminate peasant kermises, would have perceived justification for their position in Beham’s representations, Stewart argues that common folk were more sympathetic to the festivals and would have viewed the images as slapstick entertainment.

Stewart’s book accomplishes much of what it sets out to do. The author seamlessly integrates commentary from multiple sources—pamphlets, plays, legislation—with close readings of the various editions, states, and copies of peasant festival woodcuts to create for the reader an overall sense of the cultural contexts within which Beham’s images were viewed. A quote from Gualther Rivius, a Nuremberg contemporary of Beham, drives home her argument about viewer response: “Whoever finds joy in a picture of a truly drunk peasant, one who shits and vomits behind a fence, is improper and has the sense of a peasant (137).” While Rivius exemplifies the learned, humanist patricians who snubbed their noses at such pictures, his statement is proof that others valued the images more for their entertainment than moral criticism.

The book has a few, relatively minor shortcomings. First, in her argument, Stewart gives short shrift to Raupp, whose work has dominated the subject, and too much attention to Moxey. Second, regarding Bruegel and the representation of peasant festivities, it has been an acknowledged fact for some time that the theme did not originate with him. Rather he was following in a long line of Netherlandish artists, such as the Verbeek family, Pieter Baltens, and Pieter Aertsen. Finally, the text is repetitive. However, because Stewart’s argument counters much of the prevailing literature on German peasant festivities, she understandably feels the need to drive home her claims.