Johan Huizinga

Works

• 1919The Autumn of the Middle Ages

  Study of life, thought and art in France and the Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: chivalry, piety, love and death are read from chronicles and paintings, including those of the Van Eycks, as the ripe and over-ripe forms of a late culture.

• 1938Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture

  Play is older than culture: a free activity with its own rules, time and space; Huizinga traces it in law, war, poetry, philosophy and art, and warns that modern culture is losing its play-element.

Position

Huizinga is on the map as a founder of modern cultural history and as the theorist of play. “The Autumn of the Middle Ages” (1919) studied the forms of life, thought and feeling in Burgundy and the Netherlands of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – chivalry, piety, love, the image of death – through chronicles, poetry and painting. Against Jacob Burckhardt’s view of the period as the dawn of the Renaissance, he read it as the late, over-ripe flowering of medieval culture, whose forms had become elaborate and rigid. “Homo Ludens” (1938) argued that play is older than culture: a free activity, set apart from ordinary life by its own rules, time and space, from which law, war, poetry, knowledge and philosophy developed as contests and rituals. In modern mass culture, he feared, the play element was degenerating into either grim seriousness or mere amusement. In the 1930s he became a critic of his time: “In the Shadow of Tomorrow” (1935) diagnosed a crisis of culture marked by irrationalism, propaganda and the cult of the state. Gadamer took up his concept of play in “Truth and Method”, Norbert Elias drew on his picture of medieval emotional life, and Roger Caillois developed his theory of games further.

Life & context

Johan Huizinga was born on 7 December 1872 in Groningen, the son of a professor of physiology. He studied Dutch, comparative linguistics and Sanskrit in Groningen and Leipzig and took his doctorate in 1897 with a thesis on the jester in ancient Indian drama. After teaching history at a secondary school in Haarlem, he became professor of history at Groningen (1905) and at Leiden (from 1915), where he was rector in 1932–33. In 1933, as rector, he expelled the German Nazi student functionary Johann von Leers from an international student conference held at Leiden. After the German authorities closed Leiden University in November 1940, he was taken hostage in August 1942 and held in the camp of Sint-Michielsgestel until October; released for reasons of health, he was banished to De Steeg near Arnhem. He died there on 1 February 1945, a few months before the liberation.

Further main works

• Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (1919)
• Erasmus (1924)
• In de schaduwen van morgen (1935)
• Geschonden wereld (1945)