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The Waning of the Middle Ages Revisited

The author of The Waning of the Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga, is the historian who has most influenced my work, both more generally in his conception of the scope of cultural history and more specifically in his preoccupation with the relation between culture and anxiety. The essay is reprinted by permission of Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, "Twentieth-Century Classics Revisited," 103, no. 1 (Winter 1974), 35–43 .

We have come a long way since Bury informed us so firmly that history is a science, no more and no less. Historiography has now become so various and eclectic that it is often difficult to see it as the expression of any specific discipline; historians today seem to be united only by some common concern with the past and by a common allegiance, at least in principle, to respect for evidence, the exercise of critical intelligence, and openness of mind. They differ, on the whole amicably, about the questions they ask; and in answering these questions they draw freely on all the resources of their own intellectual and artistic culture. Their work often reveals highly personal qualities, sometimes latent, sometimes explicit and without apology; and although historical criticism can still find nothing better to say about much undistinguished work than that it is "definitive," it is likely to praise significant historical writing for its "imaginative power," its "vision," or its "originality." Johan Huizinga was a herald of this great change, and his Waning of the Middle Ages was one of the earliest and most influential models of the new history of the twentieth century.^[1]

He had, of course, distinguished predecessors. But Jacob Burckhardt,

to whom Huizinga was closer than has sometimes been recognized, had little general influence on the way history was written, however important he may have been for shaping the idea of the Renaissance; and Wilhelm Dilthey left no major work to illustrate his views, but only scattered essays and theoretical pronouncements not widely read by working historians. The historical profession continued on the whole, therefore, to follow what it thought of as scientific method, regarding its evidence as so much objective data to be accumulated bit by bit and then used like bricks for the construction of an edifice that was presumed to represent the past wie es eigentlich gewesen ist . Because politics had been more fully recorded than anything else, the core of most historical composition was political narrative; and although other aspects of human experience in the past were not altogether ignored, they tended in the typical history to be held aside for discussion at the end in chapters that seemed more like appendices than like an integral part of the historian's conception. Man, in this historiography, seemed little more than Homo politicus . By precept, but above all by example, Huizinga taught us how to write history differently.

He could do so partly because he was not a historians' historian but always, to his profession, something of an outsider. Largely self-trained, he observed his fellow historians—their methods, their questions, and their assumptions—with remarkable detachment and a refined irony that, it must be admitted, sometimes seemed calculated rather to annoy than to persuade. There was, perhaps, a good deal of Homo ludens in Huizinga himself; and one suspects that he enjoyed teasing his professional colleagues by deliberately ignoring, in his own work, some of their favorite concerns, or by pointing out how little their solemn categories had to do with any objective historical reality. His manner, indeed, made him appear in some respects more iconoclastic than he was. Nevertheless, his rebellion against the tendencies dominant in the historical establishment of his time was fundamental; he rejected its scientific pretensions, its belief—attached to conceptions of geological and biological evolution—in progress, and its naive confidence that the facts speak for themselves.

The narrowing of the historian's audience, for which he partly blamed these tendencies, also troubled him. In "The Task of Cultural History," a lecture delivered in 1926, seven years after the appearance of The Waning of the Middle Ages , Huizinga exposed the concerns underlying that work. He proclaimed that history should serve as "the implement with which culture accounts for its past," and he argued that it must therefore "find its sphere and its sounding board in life in general in its own day" and be read as widely as possible. Few among the great his-

torians since the Renaissance, he pointed out with perhaps a hint of malice, had been university men; and the growing confinement of history within universities seemed to him symptomatic of an increasingly unhealthy relation between scholarship and the general culture of educated men.^[2] From this standpoint The Waning of the Middle Ages presents itself as a conscious effort to restore the health of the profession to which Huizinga belonged by striking out in a new direction. He was seeking, in that book, to reclaim history for the culture of his own time, and to do so in part by redefining the relationship of the historian to his subject along what might crudely be described as humanistic rather than scientific lines, in part by incorporating into historical thought new kinds of evidence and new conceptions drawn from other human (rather than scientific) disciplines: literature and aesthetics but also social studies in which, like few other historians of his generation, he was widely read.

The importance of The Waning of the Middle Ages does not, in fact, lie in its general thesis, which—a point not always realized—was a bit old-fashioned, even reactionary. Huizinga relied heavily on Burckhardt's Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (I cite the German title because Kultur brings out, better than the English Civilization , the filiation between Burckhardt and Huizinga, the self-conscious historian of culture). Huizinga began with Burckhardt's view of cultural history as a study of the attitudes, values, and behavior patterns of men in groups in the past, a conception that largely ignored conventional political narrative. Such history turned out to have obvious affinities with sociology, anthropology, and psychology, and Huizinga, three-quarters of a century later, was in a better position to recognize this than Burckhardt.

Huizinga was also Burckhardtian in a more specific way. Far from attacking Burckhardt's conception of the Renaissance wholesale, The Waning of the Middle Ages accepted and reiterated its general validity. Burckhardt's work, after all, had been limited to Italy; and, by stressing the priority of Italy in the formation of modern culture, Burckhardt was also saying that the rest of Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had remained essentially medieval. Huizinga's book revealed how well the courtly culture of France and the Netherlands supported this view, and the central thesis of the book was its least original quality. indeed, from time to time Huizinga paid explicit tribute to the Burckhardtian orthodoxies. He made much of Michelangelo's remarks about Flemish painting to show the contrast between Italy and the North, and he thought Burckhardt equally right about literature. "Thinking of the Italian literature of the same period, the fresh and lovely period of

the quattrocento ," Huizinga wrote, "we may perhaps wonder how the form and spirit of the Renaissance can still seem so remote from the regions on this side of the Alps."^[3] Huizinga's true target was not Burckhardt but those scholars, such as Konrad Burdach or the art historian Louis Courajod, who were attempting to annex parts of medieval culture to the Renaissance in a quite un-Burckhardtian spirit, to deny the uniqueness of Italy, and to claim the Renaissance as a European phenomenon.

Not that Huizinga was a slavish disciple. Like any able scholar working in the tradition of a respected master, he reviewed Burckhardt's insights critically, tested them with fresh evidence, and limited some of Burckhardt's claims; Burckhardt, after all, had invited such treatment by modestly calling his own great work "an essay." Huizinga had the advantage of knowing more about Northern Europe in the Middle Ages than Burckhardt, and he perceived that, in some matters of detail, Burckhardt had been mistaken about the peculiarities of the Italian Renaissance; medieval culture, too, had known Stoic concern with the inconstancy of Fortune and the natural equality of man, thirst for glory, and a bold naturalism, to cite a few examples.^[4] Again, the popularity of Petrarch and Boccaccio in France led Huizinga to take a brief but closer look at these supposed founding fathers of the Renaissance, and he discovered in them more ambiguity, more that seemed medieval, than had commonly been discerned.^[5] The result was a more nuanced but still fundamentally Burckhardtian perception of the Italian Renaissance that strikingly foreshadowed some of the most fruitful achievements of recent scholarship—for example, Hans Baron's treatment of the ambiguities of the fourteenth century or Charles Trinkaus's study of the moral and religious thought of the Italian humanists.^[6]

But Huizinga also felt compelled to deal in a more basic way with the problem of innovation and tradition so central to Renaissance scholarship. Medievalists since Burckhardt had shown conclusively that a broad and respectful knowledge of the classics had been common during the Middle Ages, so that classicism in itself could no longer be taken as an essential criterion of Renaissance culture. Yet Huizinga was fully persuaded, following Burckhardt, that there was some crucial difference between medieval and modern culture, however inaccurately this had been defined. And in his effort to solve this problem we can begin to sense both his originality and something of the larger resonance of his work. His solution took the shape of a distinction between the forms of a culture and its content or spirit. The true significance of the Renaissance, he argued, did not lie in its use of classical forms, since these had been known before, but in the convergence of these forms with a

new spirit.^[7] He was traditional enough to identify this new spirit with an authentic classicism, but the principle has led to a new precision in the understanding of what was peculiar to the Renaissance. By reuniting a genuinely classical spirit to classical forms, Renaissance culture could perceive the great Greeks and Romans as inhabitants of a world very different from its own, remote in time as well as in quality.

Huizinga's distinction between form and spirit, however vague it may have seemed at the outset, thus opened the way to the emphasis of twentieth-century scholars on the peculiar historicism of the Renaissance, that sense of temporal perspective which made it possible for the first time for men to contrast themselves with other men in the past and to consider themselves modern. From this standpoint, the men of the Renaissance were indeed the first modern men, not quite for Burckhardt's reasons but because they were the first Europeans to consider themselves so. Huizinga did not explore all this himself, but the insight, with its recognition of the historical significance of subjectivity, was typical of his kind of cultural history. It also had other implications important for later historians of the Renaissance. For Renaissance historicism pointed to the relativity of all human culture, including historical and perhaps even scientific thought, to historical conditions. Huizinga's conception of his own historical activity was thus closely related to his understanding of what had occurred in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe.

Thus, even as he wrestled with the Renaissance problem, Huizinga was opening up, in The Waning of the Middle Ages , a new way of thinking about every part of the past; and here, of course, lies the larger importance of the book. It was reassuring to historians in its adherence to guild standards: it was based on objective data critically scrutinized. Nevertheless, it departed radically from prevailing assumptions about the relation between the historian and his materials. Huizinga was, in fact, proposing a far more dynamic, creative, and personally responsible conception of the historian's task than a "scientific" idea of history had permitted. He saw clearly that the ability of the historian to make sense of the past did not depend primarily on his adding to an already unmanageable body of data but on the questions he asked, and that these were products of the historian's personal insight and imagination. "Ten fools can answer more questions than one wise man can ask," he declared, inverting an old proverb.^[8] Huizinga, by his own example, was exhorting the historian to make creative use of his unavoidable subjectivity and his dependence on the culture of his time. This, for him, was the only way to restore a healthy relation between history and culture.

More specifically, the general task of historical composition, as Hui-

zinga saw it, was not to review and describe "all" the evidence (though this had to be meticulously evaluated) but to penetrate beneath it to its underlying principles; we can thus discern here a more general application of his distinction between the forms and the content of culture. But this task could not be accomplished mechanically, by following the rules of an objective methodology. It required the full engagement of the historian both as a percipient individual and as a sensitive representative of his own culture, able to ask the questions that mattered in his own time. This conviction was a fundamental addition to Burckhardt's idea of cultural history. "Only when the scholar turns to determining the patterns of life, art, and thought taken all together can there actually be a question of cultural history," he wrote. But "the nature of those patterns is not set. They obtain their form beneath our hands."^[9] Following this principle the historian could present all that men had done in the period of his concern—the totality of human culture in a given place and time—in a way that was not only historically authentic but that also illuminated the broader possibilities of the human condition. For, in Huizinga's thought, man was always at the center of the historical stage; none of his activities could be hypostatized (the efforts of historians notwithstanding); all that man did was significant at least as a form of expressive behavior, telling us what, at some moment in the past, he was like at the center of his being.

The result was both a new concreteness and a new principle of synthesis, at once Burckhardtian and going beyond Burckhardt in its ability to give coherence to the historian's total enterprise. After Huizinga, for example, intellectual history, as the simple history of ideas, could no longer be fully satisfying; it had to be an integral part of life itself, pointing ultimately to deeper impulses flowing from social and political experience or from collective psychology.

His focus on the human being at the center of history allowed Huizinga to enlarge the scope of history in ways that remarkably anticipated many of the new directions history has taken in this century, for his conception of cultural history has tended to become the definition of what, for many of us, all history should now aspire to be, even when our particular studies seem far removed from his. Nor can we blame him for failing to pursue all the provocative suggestions offered, sometimes almost casually, in The Waning of the Middle Ages . Few of his successors have been able to follow more than one or two of them.

Much of the excitement of the book lay, therefore, in its demonstration of what could be done with kinds of evidence few previous historians had known how to exploit fruitfully. Huizinga was instructive not so

much because he used artistic and literary materials as for what he made them reveal. The peculiar responses of the senses, not only of the eye and ear but also of touch, smell, and even taste became, under his guidance, historically significant. The passions as well, the manner in which they were regarded, the ways they found expression, became a part of culture. So did dreams, fantasies, delusions, fads, games symbolic structures: these were no longer too frivolous to merit the attention of a serious historian, or errors happily transcended by a more enlightened age, but profoundly instructive reflections of the human condition. Apparently without the help of Freud, Huizinga was also aware of the erotic element in human culture, an insight that informed some of his most evocative chapters. And in spite of the elitism for which he has so often been condemned, Huizinga pointed too, in one of his pregnant asides, to the special importance for the historian of the humbler dimensions of life:

The specific forms of the thought of an epoch should not only be studied as they reveal themselves in theological and philosophic speculations, or in the conceptions of creeds, but also as they appear in practical wisdom and everyday life. We may even say that the true character of the spirit of an age is better revealed in its mode of regarding and expressing trivial and commonplace things than in the high manifestations of philosophy and science.^[10]

He was equally open to methodological innovation and in some cases he practiced it. He would, I think, have been deeply sympathetic to quantitative research; consider how useful he would have found the computer for solving the following problem, which he posed with a clarity not always characteristic of later quantifiers: "To determine the taste in colors characteristic of the epoch would require a comprehensive and statistical research, embracing the chromatic scale of painting as well as the colors of costume and decorative art."^[11] Meanwhile the work of sociologists like Weber encouraged him into occasional ventures in cross-cultural comparison; thus he bolstered his remarks about the aristocratic ideal of manly perfection in Europe by noting similar conceptions in India and Japan.^[12] And, more profoundly, his approach to the life of is the past took the form of a kind of cultural functionalism. The structures of culture, in his view, were of interest to the historian because they met the most serious social needs. Much of the special quality of Huizinga's thought is conveyed in a characteristic effort to apply this principle:

The passionate and violent soul of the age, always vacillating between tearful piety and frigid cruelty, between respect and insolence, between despondency and wantonness, could not dispense with the severest rules and the strictest formalism. All emotions required a rigid system of conventional forms, for without them passion and ferocity would have made havoc of life. By this sublimating faculty each event became a spectacle for others; mirth and sorrow were artificially and theatrically made up. For want of the faculty to express emotions in a simple and natural way, recourse must needs be had to esthetic representations of sorrow and joy.^[13]

All this can be said of the greatness of Huizinga and the distinction of The Waning of the Middle Ages , and yet it is also a flawed book which even a historian sensitive to its virtues cannot find altogether satisfactory. For Huizinga was an outsider not only in respect to his own profession but also in relation to the culture of his own time, and he was therefore imperfectly fitted to mediate between the two. He was uncomfortable in an increasingly democratic world, and the development of mass culture left him with a sense of foreboding to which he gave formal expression with In the Shadow of Tomorrow (1935). The mood of that book was already present in The Waning of the Middle Ages and largely accounts for its defects as well as its peculiar point of view. Huizinga saw his own time as a period in which culture was also waning; and just as he was blind to much that others have seen as positive in the modern world, he ignored, though he was not altogether unaware of, the positive elements in the Northern European scene during the later Middle Ages.

Thus Huizinga's reaction against assumptions of progress made him reluctant to grapple with change, and his portrait of Northern Europe in the later Middle Ages is even more static than Burckhardt's of Italy. His resistance to the significance of change was reflected in a skepticism about historical periodization; and although this was wholesome in itself, it weakened his presentation of the peculiarities of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which he never clearly distinguished from what had gone before. This unsolved problem is reflected in the original Dutch title of his book, whose ambiguity is concealed by its English translation: Waning is too unequivocally negative for Herfsttij , which suggests not only autumnal decline but also the ripe fruits of the harvest.^[14] Huizinga often seems unclear whether he is describing a "primitive" and "childlike"—these are among his favorite adjectives—or a decadent and sophisticated culture.

A related defect was his basic lack of concern with explanation. Again

his impulse here was in part a healthy reaction against the facile treatment of causality by some of his contemporaries, especially Marxists, but he weakened a good point by stating it in a way that was not only playful but perhaps frivolous:

Knowing in the historical sense rarely if ever means indicating a strictly closed causality. It is always an understanding of contexts. . . . This context is always an open one, which is to say that it may never be represented in the metaphor of links forming a chain, but only in that of a loosely bound bundle of sticks to which new twigs can be added as long as the band around them allows it. Perhaps more suitable than a bundle of sticks might be a bunch of wildflowers. In their variety and their difference in value new notions added to the conception of a historical context are like newly found flowers in the nosegay: each one changes the appearance of the whole bouquet.^[15]

The conception may have fitted the historical "still-lifes" that came out of his own study, but it was hardly helpful in accounting for the "waning" of the Middle Ages; and he could not altogether avoid the problem of cause. Yet when he did deal with it, he took refuge in a kind of organic cultural determinism that seems more like evasion than explanation. The waning of medieval culture, he suggested, was a product of fatigue, the result of the long and strenuous elaboration of its potentialities: "What may be called a stagnation of thought prevails, as though the mind, exhausted after building up the spiritual fabric of the Middle Ages, had sunk into inertia."^[16] But this was a betrayal of his own deepest insights. It implies that, in spite of his sociological interests, some part of his mind still clung to the notion of an autonomous culture developing, in the custody of a cultivated elite, according to its own internal dynamics.

Yet this also helps to explain why he refused to look seriously beyond aristocratic culture at the forces that were making the old nobility superfluous and at the energies already at work in the formation of a new culture—a serious limitation that also reflected his indifference to both change and cause. He did not choose to face the double significance of the notion of decadence at the heart of his book, the symbiosis of old and new, decay and growth. Every positive development he either minimized, like nominalism, or omitted, like the movements of religious renewal. He was not unaware of what was positive in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the end of his book suggested what a more balanced depiction of the later Middle Ages would have included: "A high and strong culture is declining, but at the same time and in the

same sphere new things are being born."^[17] He was even inconsistent enough to admire the novelties of Italy. But the contrast between "a high and strong culture" and "new things" sticks in the mind. Huizinga did not much care for new things, and so he left them out of what he nevertheless often seems to want us to accept as the essential truth about the later Middle Ages.

Yet, in spite of its defects, in spite of the fact that so much in The Waning of the Middle Ages has now become the common possession of historians so that its work has in this respect largely been done, the book is still well worth reading. It can be enjoyed as a work of high art, full of color and life, as in its marvelous opening chapter with its bells and processions, its public executions and public tears. Or it can be read as documentation of an important transition in the cultural history of our own century, as illuminating for its ambivalence and confusion as for its movement from one stage to the next. But the work will continue to be read above all, I think, for another reason. Just as man, in all his multifaceted complexity, is for Huizinga at the center of history, so Huizinga the man, in all his brilliance and complexity, remains at the center of the history he wrote. Since Huizinga revealed so much of himself in his work and since he had a singularly original and stimulating mind, provocative even when it seems most limited and perverse, The Waning of the Middle Ages has the kind of vitality that causes historical writing to be read long after its own time.