Scholarship and/as Performance: The Case of Johan Huizinga and His Concept of “Historical Sensation”

Abstract

In the pages that follow, we will explore a celebrated example of one scholar who strove, with ambiguous success, to put aesthetics—the “artistic”—into serious collaboration with scholarship. I refer to the Dutch historian, Johan Huizinga (1872–1945), the recurring subject of robust debate over matters of art and scholarship. The question following Huizinga’s writings have centered on whether or not he is a “real” historian. Huizinga’s Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen: Studie over levens- en gedachtenvormen der veertiende en vijftiende eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden.¹ The Waning of the Middle Ages, as hereafter it is referred to, has been read by great numbers of undergraduates for generations. Historians ask, however: is it history? Is it useful for anything other than displaying the dazzling stylistic and intellectual idiosyncrasies—and brilliance, some would contend—of the author? Indeed, conceived in total, Huizinga’s work—with the possible exception of his influential study of civilization and “play,” Homo Ludens (1938)—epitomizes the most lamentable reception a scholar can face: to be exceptionally popular but academically questionable.