 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch This is an archive of a dead website. The original website was published by Petri Liukkonen under Creative Commons BY-ND-NC 1.0 Finland and reproduced here under those terms for non-commercial use. All pages are unmodified as they originally appeared; some links and images may no longer function. A .zip of the website is also available. |
|
Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) |
|
Dutch historian, whose most famous works include The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919), which dealt with life, ideas, art, and behaviors of the upper classes of Burgundy in the 14th and 15th centuries, Erasmus (1924), a biography of the famous Dutch Renaissance scholar, and Homo Ludens (1938), focusing on the element of play in human culture. Like the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), Johan Huizinga was a harsh critic of mass culture and technology. "When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness that joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child. Every event, every deed was defined in given and expressive forms and was in accord with the solemnity of marriage, death – by virtue of the sacraments, basked in the radiance of the divine mystery. But even the lesser events – a journey, labor, a visit – were accompanied by a multitude of blessings, ceremonies, sayings, and conventions." (from The Autumn of the Middle Ages) Johan Huizinga was born in Groningen, the son of Dirk Huizinga, a professor of physiology, and Jacoba Tonkens, who died two years after his birth. Huizinga attended the municipal Gymnasium and entered in 1891 the university, earning his degree in Indo-Germanic languages in 1895. Huizinga then studied comparative linguistics at the University of Leipzig, and after returning from Germany he earned in 1897 his Ph.D. Huizinga's dissertation dealt with the clown figure in Sanskrit drama. His early interest was history, but at the gymnasium his teachers had been so poor, that he changed into linguistics. During the following years he taught history at a secondary school in Harlem and lectured in 1903-05 on ancient history at the University of Amsterdam. In 1905 he became professor of history at Groningen. After the death of his first wife, Mary Vincentia Schorer (1877-1914), he moved from Groningen to Leiden, where he was appointed in 1915 professor of general history at the university. From 1916 to 1932 Huizinga was an editor of the periodical De Gids. He traveled in the United States
in 1926, but he had already published a study on the national characteristics of the country, Mensch en
menigte in America (1918, Man and the Crowd in America). The journey produced Amerika Levend en Denkend (1926,
Life and Thought in America). Huizinga saw that America's mind was
"fundamentally antihistorical," lamented "mediocrity which permeates
American life," and agreed with William James's remark that "progress
is a terrible thing". For Huizinga, the United States was an object of
lesson on what could go wrong if Europeans adopt similar idols of
technocracy and over-organization. In 1938 Huizinga became vice-president of the International Committee of Intellectual Cooperation with the League of Nations. Alarmed by the rise of fascism and cultural crisis Huizinga wrote In de schaduwen van morgen (1935), which his son Jacob Herman Huizinga translated into English under the title In the Shadow of Tomorrow. "We live in a demened world, and we know it," are its opening lines. In 1937 Huizinga married Auguste Schölvinck, 37 years his junior. After the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II, the University of Leiden was closed. In 1941 Huizinga gave a speech in which he criticized German influence on Dutch science and he was arrested by the Nazis. Huizinga was released in 1942 but not allowed to return to Leiden. Huizinga died in detention at De Steeg in Gerderland, near Arnheim, on February 1, 1945, just a few months before the end of the war. In his inaugural lecture at Groningen Huizinga had supported the view, that historical
knowledge is essentially aesthetic, intuitive, and subjective. This approach was fully
developed in Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (The Autumn of the Middle Ages), a nostalgic
views of the the past world, which he wrote for both the wide public and specialists. Dutch
historians received the work coolly but abroad it became a success and was soon translated
into English and other languages. Fritz Hopman's elegant translation was entitled The Waning of the Middle Ages
(1924); this edition was shortened by one third. The Dutch-born
historian Karl Joachim Weintraub dismissed it as a "very inferior,
crippled version of the original," but nevertheless, it was assigned as
a required text at American universities until the complete translation
by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch came out in 1996. "Is it
possible," Payton asked in his introduction, "that English-speaking
historians have been discussing this book with their foreign colleagues
without realizing that they were reading a significantly different
text?" Huizinga's masterwork was inspired by an exhibition of early Netherlandic
painting, which Huizinga saw in 1902 in Bruges. Jan van Eyck's art aroused his interest in the Middle
Ages, but it also must be noted that after the mid-1920s, Huizinga devoted relatively little
time to this period – his lectures at the Sorbonne being the major
exception. Huizinga was not entirely happy with the word "herfsttij" in the title of the book, due to its
associations with doom and decay, but preferred the positive side of the autumnal symbolism,
the suggestion of harvestide. The Autumn of the Middle Ages, written in poetic style,
portrays vividly the age through contradictions – after witch hunts were finished in the city of Arras, people
celebrated it by arranging a competition in moral tales (folies moralisées), and at the
same time when religious thinking and fanaticism dominated everyday life, church services and
the clergy were mocked. Monks cursed and prostitutes made deals inside church buildings.
On the other hand, the poetic concept of love was an essential part of chivalry.
"In no other epoch did the ideal of civilisation amalgamate to such a degree with that of
love," Huizinga said. Homo Ludens examined the role of play in law, war, science,
poetry, philosophy, and art. Huizinga saw the instinct for play as the
central element in human culture – all human activities are playing:
"Now in myth and ritual the great instinctive forces of civilized life
have their origin: law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art,
poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primaeval soil of
play." The true spirit of play is happy inspiration; it is voluntary,
outside the ordinary life-boundaries, secluded and limited in time and
space, rule-governed. According to Huizinga, the touch with pure play
has been lost in modern time: "work and production became the ideal,
and then the idol, of the age". Huizinga wrote the book when "old
Europe" approaching its end, before war, and was translating it into
English and adding material after the Nazis invaded Poland. Dutch Civilization in the Seventeenth Century was a collection of essays. In 'My Path to History,' which was first published in Dutch in 1947, Huizinga described his his early fascination with history, his studies and the genesis of The Autumn of the Middle Ages. Although the title of the book paralleled processes in nature, fruition and decline with culture, Huizinga did not believe that history follows certain cyclic pattern exemplified in Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918-1922), or could be understood through Darwinist concepts. He emphasized intuitive understanding, regarding history essentially as a form of mental activity in which a culture views its past. For the modern technological world Huizinga had a strong dislike, and he claimed that educated people in the times of Macaulay (1800-59) and Ranke (1795-1886) understood history better than his contemporaries. For further reading: Johan Huizinga by C. Antoni (1935); Herinneringen aan mijn vader by Leonhard Huizinga (1963); Visions of Culture: Voltaire, Guizot, Burckhardt, Lamprecht, Huizinga, Ortega y Gasset by K.J. Weintraub (1966); The Waning Middle Ages by J.L. Schrader and B. Waller (1969); Johan Huiginza 1872-1972, ed. by W.R.H. Koops et al. (1973); '"This, Here, and Soon": Johan Huizinga's Esquisse of American Culture,' in Selvages & Biases: The Fabric of History in American Culture by Michael Kammen (1987); Historicus tegen de tijd by Wessel E. Krul (1990); Johan Huizinga: Leven en werk in beelden en documenten by Anton van der Lem (1993); Huizinga en de troost van de geschiedenis: Verbeelding en rede by Léon Hanssen (1996); Het Eeuwige verbeeld in een afgehaald bed: Huizinga en de Nederlandse beschaving by Anton van der Lem (1997); 'The Autumns of Johan Huizinga', by James C. Kennedy, in Mediavealism and the Academy, eds. David Metzger, Kathleen Verduin, & Leslie J. Workman (1997); 'Play in Culture and the Jargon of Primordiality: A Critique of Homo Ludens' by Mechthild Nagel in Play & Culture Studies: Volume 1, ed. by Margaret Carlisle Duncan, Garry Chick & Alan Aycock (1998); 'When the World was Half a Thousand Years Younger: Color and Concept in Johan Huizinga's Autumn of the Middle Ages' by David Pickus, in Fifteenth Century Studies:Volume 25 (2000); Johan Huizinga: Geschichtswissenschaft als Kulturgeschichte by Christoph Strupp (2000) Selected works:
|
