Herfsttij Der Middeleeuwen by Johan Huizinga

Published in twenty-three editions in Huizinga’s original Dutch, translated into at least eighteen other languages, it prompted (along with his other books) the author’s nomination several times for the Nobel prize in literature. Decades later, I discovered that, without realising it, I had echoed another lyrical passage from the book in one of my own.įor a century now, Huizinga’s masterpiece has evoked such responses in its readers. Here was a reason to study history: not to learn names and dates, but to penetrate the hearts and minds of people long dead, to see and feel through them a distant world. Historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) ranks among the most influential Dutch thinkers of the twentieth century. A fur tabard, a roaring fire, drink and banter and a soft bed still possessed that intense degree of pleasure….

Honour and riches were enjoyed more deeply and more avidly, for they stood out more starkly than they do now against the howling poverty and abasement. Sickness contrasted more sharply with health the biting cold and fearful darkness of winter were evils that were much more real. There was less relief from disasters and death than there is now they were more terrifying and more anguishing. Between grief and gladness, between calamity and good fortune, the distance seemed greater than it does to us everything one experienced had that high degree of immediacy and absoluteness that joy and sorrow still have in the minds of children…. When the world was five centuries younger, all the affairs of life had much sharper outward forms than they do now. It captured the look and feel of a bygone era with unmatched vividness, firing up my imagination from its first words: Of all the history books I read as an undergraduate student, none gripped me like Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages, as it was then called. ‘The translator has captured the poetic qualities of Huizinga’s authorial voice without sacrificing the readability of the text.’ But has the new edition that captures ‘the late medieval spirit’ in France and the Low Countries any added value? Historian Ben Kaplan is convinced it will attract new generations of readers. A century after its first appearance, there is a new and unabridged English translation of Johan Huizinga’s classic Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen

Herfsttij Der Middeleeuwen by Johan Huizinga