Johan Huizinga

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The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) is known for his books on cultural history and essays on the philosophy of history.

Johan Huizinga was born on Dec. 7, 1872, in Groningen. Trained as a linguist and a specialist in Sanskrit at the universities of Groningen and Leipzig, he received his doctorate in 1897 and went on to become a high school teacher in Haarlem and a teacher of Indic studies in Amsterdam. His interests soon turned to the history of his own country, however, and in 1905 he published The Origins of Haarlem. The same year he was appointed professor at Groningen University; in 1915 he was named professor at Leiden University.

Like Swiss historian Jacob Christoph Burckhardt, Huizinga was a cultural conservative, strongly elitist, and in later years deeply despondent over the future of European civilization. Like Burckhardt, he took as his professional task the description of periods of cultural history. Whereas the Swiss historian had conceived of culture as the spontaneous creation of free individuals, Huizinga defined culture as the state of a community "when the domination of nature in the material, moral, and spiritual realms permits a state of existence which is higher and better than the given natural conditions," a state of "harmonious balance of material and social values."

Huizinga's first major work, and his greatest, was The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919), in which he portrayed "the forms of life, thought, and art" in the Burgundian state of the 14th and 15th centuries. He saw it as a period of violence, terrified by the image of death, from which men escaped by creating a "dream of life," coloring life with fancy. By their idealized style of knighthood, their conventions of love, their images of religious sensibility, they transformed or hid the real world in which they lived. Huizinga recaptured these colors of late medieval life with great vividness of style.

To Huizinga several aspects of this late medieval culture were essentially forms of play. In Homo Ludens (1938) he addressed the problem directly: to what extent does human culture result from play and to what extent does it express itself in the forms of play? His concern was not with games but with the play element of law, war, poetry, philosophy, science, and art, the sportive qualities of serious concerns. Along with the earnest, he argued, play is necessary to true culture.

Huizinga also wrote Men and Mass in America (1918), a biography Erasmus of Rotterdam (1924), Holland's Culture in the Seventeenth Century (1932), and numerous essays on historiography and the contemporary scene. When Leiden University was closed by the Germans in 1940, Huizinga was interned as a hostage. Released for reasons of ill health, he died in the village of De Steeg on Feb. 1, 1945.

Further Reading

A brief analysis of Huizinga's conception of culture is presented by Karl J. Weintraub, Visions of Culture (1966). Pieter Geyl gives a critical view of Huizinga's work in Encounters in History (1961).

Johan Huizinga.

Johan Huizinga (Dutch pronunciation: [joːhɑn hœyzɪŋxaː]) (December 7, 1872 - February 1, 1945), was a Dutch historian and one of the founders of modern cultural history.

Contents 1 Life 2 Works 3 Family 4 Works 5 References 6 External links

Life

Born in Groningen as the son of Dirk Huizinga, a professor of physiology, and Jacoba Tonkens, who died two years after his birth,^[1] he started out as a student of Indo-Germanic languages, earning his degree in 1895. He then studied comparative linguistics, gaining a good command of Sanskrit. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the role of the jester in Indian drama in 1897.

It was not until 1902 that his interest turned towards medieval and Renaissance history. He continued teaching as an Orientalist until he became a Professor of General and Dutch History at Groningen University in 1905. Then, in 1915, he was made Professor of General History at Leiden University, a post he held until 1942. From this point until his death in 1945 he was held in detention by the Nazis. He died in De Steeg in Gelderland, near Arnhem, and lies buried in the graveyard of the Reformed Church at 6 Haarlemmerstraatweg in Oegstgeest.^[2]

Works

Huizinga had an aesthetic approach to history, where art and spectacle played an important part. His most famous work is The Autumn of the Middle Ages (a.k.a. The Waning of the Middle Ages) (1919). He here reinterprets the later Middle Ages as a period of pessimism and decadence rather than rebirth.

Worthy of mentioning are also Erasmus (1924) and Homo Ludens (1938). In the latter book he discusses the possibility that play is the primary formative element in human culture. Huizinga also published books on American history and Dutch history in the 17th century.

Alarmed by the rise of national-socialism in Germany, Huizinga wrote several works of cultural criticism. Many similarities can be noted between his analysis and that of contemporary critics such as Ortega y Gasset and Oswald Spengler. Huizinga argued that the spirit of technical and mechanical organisation had replaced spontaneous and organic order and cultural as well as political life.

Family

Huizinga's son Leonhard Huizinga became a well known writer in the Netherlands, especially renowned for his series of tongue in cheek fiction novels on the Dutch aristocratic twins Adrian and Oliver ("Adriaan en Olivier").

Works

• Mensch en menigte in America (1918)
• Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (1919), translated as The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924) and as The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1996)
• Erasmus of Rotterdam (1924)
• Amerika Levend en Denkend (1926), translated by H.H. Rowen as America: A Dutch Historian's Vision, from Afar and Near (1972)
• Leven en werk van Jan Veth (1927)
• Cultuurhistorische verkenningen (1929)
• In de schaduwen van morgen (1935), translated by his son Jacob Herman Huizinga In the Shadow of Tomorrow
• De wetenschap der geschiedenis (1937)
• Homo Ludens (1938)

References

1. ^ Johan Huizinga, books and writers
2. ^ Van Ditzhuijzen, Jeannette (September 9 2005). Bijna vergeten waren ze, de rustplaatsen van roemruchte voorvaderen. Trouw (Dutch newspaper), p. 9 of supplement.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Johan Huizinga

• Johan Huizinga The Waning of the Middle Ages
• Works by Johan Huizinga at Project Gutenberg
• Johan Huizinga at The Dictionary of Art Historians.

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