A Brill Calendar: December 7

Huizinga and the Middle Ages

Few authors write in a way that is attractive throughout the ages.

Excellent writing and style are among the most powerful determinants for residence in the Pantheon of Genius. Most philosophers of earlier ages who continue to help and shape new avenues of thought maintain an unstained reputation as superb authors. Plato, the one-man fountainhead of the Western philosophical tradition, is a prime example for that proposition; but Saint Augustine, Sir Francis Bacon, Blaise Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Camus follow in that wake, to name but a few.

Something similar applies to historians; perhaps even more stringently. There is no doubt that Gibbon, Macaulay, Michelet, Prescott and von Ranke are still widely read; although their methodology and use of sources have been largely surpassed. Perhaps it applies as well to Johan Huizinga (Groningen, December 7, 1872 – De Steeg, February 1, 1945). His grandiose feat is an exquisitely written monograph for a general audience: ‘Herfsttij der middeleeuwen’.

Huizinga, trained as a linguist in the Universities of Groningen and Leipzig and acted as a high-school teacher in Haarlem, before returning to the city he was born and his Alma Mater as a Professor in medieval and modern history. In 1915 he became a Leyden Professor. When his ‘magnum opus’, the ‘Waning of the Middle Ages’ (1919) was printed, many contemporary professional servants of Clio, Muse of History, refused to take the book seriously. Yet, Huizinga’s notions and preoccupations are still alive; not just in the Netherlands. It is seldom that the country saw – and continues to see - a historian mainly as a critic of (inter)national cultures and as an arbiter of contemporary issues.

If Huizinga wouldn’t have been a superb author he might have been forgotten. Perhaps.