author
Caroline Taylor Stewart
Best remembered for a compact but memorable study of werewolf lore, this early 20th-century scholar brought a folklorist’s curiosity to one of literature’s strangest subjects. Her work connects myth, language, and anthropology in a way that still feels fresh.
1 Audiobook
The Origin of the Werewolf Superstition
by Caroline Taylor Stewart
About the author
Caroline Taylor Stewart was an American scholar of language and folklore. A reference entry summarized by the Persons of Indian Studies project says she studied at Kansas State University, the University of Michigan, and Bryn Mawr, then continued her studies in Germany and earned a Ph.D. in Berlin in 1901.
From 1905, she served as an assistant professor of Germanics at the University of Missouri, where she taught for many years. The same source also links her to work in linguistics and philology, including studies of Germanic language and the history of numerals.
Readers today are most likely to know her through The Origin of the Werewolf Superstition (1909), a short scholarly work later preserved by Project Gutenberg. In it, she explores werewolf belief across cultures and treats the subject not as mere sensational folklore, but as a clue to older rituals, fears, and ways of understanding the world.