Work · Science & Human Sciences
The 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.
Introduction
Huizinga published “Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen” in Haarlem in 1919; German (1924) and English (1924, abridged) translations made it internationally known. The book studies life, thought and art in France and the Burgundian Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: the ideal of chivalry, courtly love, piety, the image of death, symbolism, and the painting of Jan van Eyck. Using chronicles, poetry and pictures, Huizinga describes the sharp contrasts and elaborate forms of a late culture and argues that this was an autumn of the Middle Ages, not a dawn of the Renaissance – a challenge to Burckhardt’s view. The book is one of the classics of cultural history.
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Connections
Criticizes
- The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy1860 · Jacob Burckhardt
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