HISTORICAL CONCEPTUALIZATION: Huizinga

Abstract

[J. Huizinga (1872–1945) belonged to that remarkable group of Dutch, Belgian, and Swiss historians—Jakob Burckhardt, Henri Pirenne, Pieter Geyl, and Werner Kaegi—who have contributed so much to the development of history, especially cultural history. By his own account a highly unconventional historian—he had studied linguistics and was known first as a student of Sanskrit—Huizinga had been attracted to history by his aesthetic pleasure in viewing the past, by his exceptional empathy for it. He was appointed professor of history at Gröningen in 1905, and called to the University of Leyden ten years later. Like Burckhardt, he was able to capture a moment’s impression in masterly pencil sketches and wrote history in a similarly precise, yet impressionistic manner. In his greatest work, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919), Huizinga, with an intuitive grasp of the spirit of late medieval art and popular culture, portrays that period not as the seedtime of the Renaissance but as a period of decay and decline. In his Erasmus (1923) he attained an equally sure sense of the inner life of the great humanist and compatriot.