"The Autumn of the Middle Ages" by Johan Huizinga

 

Translated from the Dutch by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch

Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) was a professor of history at the University of Leiden from 1915 until the Nazis closed the university in 1942 and held him hostage until shortly before his death. He first published The Autumn of the Middle Ages in 1919; this book represents a translation of 1921’s second edition. The current translators, both from the University of Western Washington, cite problems with the first translation into English, such as adaptations and misstatements that change Huizinga’s original meaning, as justification for their own version. This current version was not published until 1996, after the death of Ulrich Mammitzsch.

Huizinga set himself the task of pinpointing the changes in philosophy, art, and literature which mark the end of the Medieval period, and the beginning of the Renaissance. He tackled it with unstinting effort and monumental erudition. He sets his stage in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in Burgundy, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

Following a rigorous and concise logic, Huizinga establishes the culture of the time: in secular politics it was a time of insecurity, marked by separation of families, regions, and nations into feuding parties. This insecurity led nobility and the merchant class to agitate with their overlords to subject their neighbors to a reign of terror. In religion, the Church’s faithful followed a primitive (Huizinga’s word) and impersonal form of adoration based on visual icons (which made it easier to worship) and an absurd legalistic weighing and balancing of sins and indulgences as they tried to finagle their way into heaven. Literature, even of the more serious, higher kind, followed set formulae of verse length, rhyming patterns, and even theme.

The author treats each of these features at considerable length, and cites a wide range of contemporary sources and examples. I found the whole to be entirely convincing, even though the later chapters suffer from an overabundance of citation and a growing mix of sources, themes, and points he felt he had to make. The book is set up somewhat awkwardly as well: I read the epub version and found jumping between the many passages in the original Middle French, and the appendices containing translations, a bit burdensome. I’m not sure how I would have solved this issue; I may have put the originals in appendices and let the main narrative flow with translations.

Huizinga takes pains to point out areas where 14th or 15th Century Burgundian or French thought anticipated the Renaissance humanism which would follow, but his conclusions about such things always carries magisterial weight. I am no one to question it. He’s always reasonable, specific, and balanced.

This is a useful volume; it puts the curious reader directly in touch with a famous scholar who has studied his subject closely and communicates his conclusions persuasively. If this period in history interests you, this late-coming treatise is an excellent place to start.