INTRODUCTION by Bert F.

Hoselitz

A look at a portrait of Johan Huizinga might lead one to think

that he had been a successful Dutch lawyer or business man
rather than one of the foremost innovators in history which
this century has produced. His face is placid and open and
has an air of ease and serenity. There is nothing intense about
his features and though his expression reflects a thoughtful
mind and moral force, it does not appear to be that of a man
of quite uncommon creativity and imagination.
Huizinga's life was almost as commonplace as his outward
appearance. He comes from a long line of steadfast Mennonite
preachers. He was born on December 7, 1872, in Groningen,
where his father was professor at the university. Huizinga
obtained his doctor's degree there in May 1897, his studies
having been mainly in thefieldof Indo-Aryan philology. After
graduation from the university he secured a teaching position
in history at a high school in Haarlem, where he remained
eight years. Then he was called as professor of history to his
alma mater and in 1915 he was appointed to the chair of
general history and historical geography at the University of
Leiden, the leading institution of higher learning in the Nether-
lands. He held this position until 1942, when the university
was closed by the occupying authorities of Nazi Germany.
Throughout the first period of the German occupation
Huizinga had maintained an intransigent attitude in favor
of academic freedom and therightsof his fellow countrymen.
He was therefore arrested and imprisoned in the concentra-
tion camp at St. Michielsgestel. Huizinga was then nearly
seventy, suffering from poor eyesight, and as a consequence of
the deprivations of German rule, from poor health in general.
9

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 10 MEN AND IDEAS
Owing to a Swedish intervention on his behalf he was released
from the concentration camp in October 1942, but he was not
permitted to return to his home in Leiden. He was exiled to
the small village De Steeg near Arnhem, where he produced
his last works separated from his friends and pupils and de-
prived of his books. The last winter of the war, 1944-5, was
especially hard. Holland suffered from an acute shortage of
food, and De Steeg became for a time a spot in the front
line. Early in 1945 Huizinga became ill, and died on February
1, without having lived to see what he had wished and worked
for so intensely: the liberation of his beloved country.
The outline of Huizinga's life betrays nothing about the
peculiar quality of his work or the nature of his contribution
to history and social science. And even if we had included
the many honors that he received in his lifetime and appended
a list of his main works, they would have given only very
scant indication of the flavor of his writings.
In 1933, two days before Hitler's ascent to power, Huizinga
delivered a lecture in Berlin in which he discussed the position
of the Netherlands as a cultural mediator between Central
and Western Europe. In this lecture he tried to explain this
intermediary position of Holland by its participation in two
and perhaps three national cultures. Linguistically—and for
a long time politically—Holland was a part of the Germanies.
Its economic ties with the Hansa towns was strong, and in
more recent times it formed a bridge between the industry of
the Rhineland and overseas. But Holland also has close ties
with France. Its membership in the Burgundian state, which
was an offshoot of France, established close political ties with
the French monarchy. In the sixteenth century Holland re-
ceived many Huguenot refugees who settled there permanently.
In the last decades of the old regime it was often visited by
poets, artists, statesmen, philosophers, and scientists from
France.
Holland's ties with Britain were more tenuous, but despite
several wars between the two countries in the seventeenth
century, Britons were prominent in Amsterdam as traders,
visitors, and often residents. The Dutch were thus in an ex-
cellent position to absorb and integrate elements of several
national cultures to fashion a civilization into which many of
the best foreign elements—from Germany, France, Britain,
and even Holland's former enemy, Spain—could find a place.

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 Introduction 11
Huizinga's description of Holland's position as an inter-
mediary forms an analogy to his own position in science. He
was regarded as a historian of civilization. But his true position
was that of a writer who in his own work represents a com-
bination and integration of some of the best and most pro-
found elements of history and social science. This is a reason
why it is difficult to classify his work. It undoubtedly contains
a strong ingredient derived from history. But many of his
themes spill over into the realms of sociology, politics, psy-
chology, and criticism of the arts in all their manifestations.
But these various ingredients are blended into a uniform com-
position in which they all lose their separateness and form
the seemingly indispensable parts of a well-rounded whole.
Indeed, perhaps without consciously attempting it, Huizinga
succeeds in mediating between a social-science and a human-
istic approach, in selecting from each branch what fits best
into his work, and in combining in this manner the aptest
contributions each discipline has to offer.
In addition, his fine ear for language and the music of
words, and his philological training, add a delicacy of ex-
pression and a new dimension of insight to his works, which
make them not only unique achievements in social history
but also works of art in their own right and great contributions
to literature.
To be sure, in the various writings of Huizinga the particular
mix of historical, sociological, and psychological elements
varies. In some of his early essays on some aspects of the
local history of Haarlem or Frisia, the historical element pre-
dominates. But although these essays are composed with the
fullest and most exacting use of documentary materials, in
the orthodox manner of historians, Huizinga betrays his meta-
historical interests by the choice of his subject matter and the
increasing emphasis on social interrelations. This tendency to
go beyond history into the manifestations of the life of repre-
sentative social groups becomes an ever growing facet of
Huizinga's work, and his last major works, In the Shadow of
Tomorrow and Homo Ludens, may be regarded as predomi-
nantly socio-psychological or socio-political studies drawing on
a vast amount of historical erudition.
Huizinga's growing preoccupation with social and socio-
psychological problems may be discerned in his successive
major writings. His early studies on Dutch local history con-

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 12 MEN AND IDEAS
tained, as already pointed out, little besides orthodox historical
materials. After his move to Groningen and even more after
his appointment at Leiden, he becomes preoccupied with the
social relations of the epochs he describes, with the state of
mind of the persons who dominated a period and impressed
upon it its character. Out of this framework grew Huizinga's
most famous work, The Waning of the Middle Ages. But this
is also the basis on which the bulk of his work of his most
productive years is built. Huizinga was too well-schooled in
methods of classical historiography to fail to realize that he
was following an unorthodox path. He called his procedure
"cultural history" and separated it, in this way, from the
more conservative "general history." But more importantly,
in helping to create a new discipline he had to define its central
character, and in so doing he hit on a splendid simile. What
the cultural historian aimed at was the creation of a portrait
of an age or a society. The Waning of the Middle Ages may
be likened to a vast canvas which, like the great altarpieces
of the brothers Van Eyck, contains a prodigious variety of
detail, and yet does not detract from the main central theme
of the picture. They are all there in Hubert and Jan van
Eyck's triptych at Ghent, the shepherds and the angels, the
kings, and the philosophers, the fools and the burghers, the
maidens and the clerics. And all of them are painted with a
loving care for detail, with a painstaking effort to execute
the most insignificant feature as carefully as the central focus
of the work, the Lamb of God. Huizinga has borrowed this
method from the great Flemish painters whose art dominated
the period about which he wrote. In his work on the theory
of cultural history Huizinga had explained that each culture
develops its own expressive forms in terms of which it must
be understood. And so in writing about the last flowering of
Burgundian medieval civilization, he has adopted, perhaps un-
consciously, the forms that resemble those of the greatest
artists of that epoch.
But just as Van Eyck did not confine his art to large trip-
tychs but also painted intimate portraits of bishops and po-
tentates—and ordinary men and women of his time—so
Huizinga found that he could interpret medieval civilization
better if he supplemented his great book by a number of
smaller essays. And from this feeling arose the pen portraits
of some of the great figures of the Middle Ages and the

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 Introduction 13
Renaissance, John of Salisbury, Joan of Arc, Abelard, Alain
de Lille, and above all, Erasmus of Rotterdam.
In the execution of these essays Huizinga became increas-
ingly concerned with the problem of how to interpret and
evaluate critically the spirit of an age. In his work on the
outcome of medieval civilization in northwestern Europe he
had tried one approach. He was only too well aware that
Burckhardt in his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy,
sixty years before The Waning of the Middle Ages, had
traveled a different road toward the understanding of the
spirit of an age. But whereas Burckhardt had found the
material for his study in the lives of the great, Huizinga
searched for it in the dreams and hopes, the laughter and the
tears, of the many small people of all social classes and
groups. And even in his biographies, in which perforce he
had to obtain his material from the deeds of the famous and
the wise, he tried to supply a backdrop of the everyday ex-
istence and the ordinary actions of the common people among
whom they lived.
It is perhaps no accident that the medieval personages whom
Huizinga selected for biographical treatment were almost all
prophets or poets—or a mixture of the two. Since poets and
prophets express the hopes and sentiments of their times more
freely than others, Huizinga could, by simply pursuing the
themes they develop, depict a wider vista of their culture than
if he had chosen the life histories of kings or warriors. And
since Huizinga knew that the truest expression of a culture
is found in some of the most starkly emotional utterances
of the personages who formed the intellectual elite of an age,
the lives of Abelard or Joan of Arc provide unusually apt
vehicles for a depiction of the civilization of the Middle Ages.
But Huizinga wrote essays on other than biographical sub-
jects. In these essays the "hero" who holds the center of the
stage is not a person, but an institution, an idea, or a custom.
But the basic procedure here is the same as that which
Huizinga employs in his biographical essays. He describes
the background and environment in which an institution or
idea existed, and he traces its genesis and growth in its inter-
action with this background. He may select medieval chivalry
or the growth of sentiments of national consciousness in
Europe for his topic; in each case the result is an essay in
cultural history in which the special primary subject is seen

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 14 MEN AND IDEAS
not as a thing in itself, but as an object that attains meaning
and structure only by its interaction through time with the
civilization of which it forms a part and in which it exists.
Huizinga's reputation as an artist in the history of culture is
based primarily on his larger works, most notably on The
Waning of the Middle Ages. But his full skill and versatility
become even more apparent in his shorter essays. They are,
like all of Huizinga's writings, masterpieces of integration,
but by stressing sometimes individual psychological, some-
times methodological, and sometimes socio-historical factors,
they provide, in their totality, the best insight into his genius.

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