"The advantages of the new translation are so many. . . . It is one of the greatest, as well as one of
the most enthralling, historical classics of the twentieth century, and everyone will surely want to read it in
the form that was obviously intended by the author."
--Francis Haskell, New York Review of Books
"A once pathbreaking piece of historical interpretation. . . . This new translation will no doubt bring Huizinga
and his pioneering work back into the discussion of historical interpretation."
--Rosamond McKitterick, New York Times Book Review
The University of Chicago Press Web Site, August, 2000
Summary
The Autumn of the Middle Ages is Johan Huizinga's classic portrait of life, thought, and art in fourteenth-
and fifteenth-century France and the Netherlands. Few who have read this book in English realize that The Waning
of the Middle Ages, the only previous translation, is vastly different from the original Dutch, and incompatible
will all other European-language translations.
For Huizinga, the fourteenth- and fifteen-century marked not the birth of a dramatically new era in history--the
Renaissance--but the fullest, ripest phase of medieval life and thought. However, his work was criticized both
at home and in Europe for being "old-fashioned" and "too literary" when The Waning of the Middle
Ages was first published in 1919. In the 1924 translation, Fritz Hopman adapted, reduced and altered the Dutch
edition--softening Huizinga's passionate arguments, dulling his nuances, and eliminating theoretical passages.
He dropped many passages Huizinga had quoted in their original old French. Additionally, chapters were rearranged,
all references were dropped, and mistranslations were introduced.
This translation corrects such errors, recreating the second Dutch edition which represents Huizinga's thinking
at its most important stage. Everything that was dropped or rearranged has been restored. Prose quotations appear
in French, with translations preprinted at the bottom of the page, mistranslations have been corrected.
Subjects:
History: European History
Medieval Studies
Table of Contents
Translator's Introduction
Preface to the Dutch Edition
Preface to the German Translation
Ch. 1: The Passionate Intensity of Life
Ch. 2: The Craving for a More Beautiful Life
Ch. 3: The Heroic Dream
Ch. 4: The Forms of Love
Ch. 5: The Vision of Death
Ch. 6: The Depiction of the Sacred
Ch. 7: The Pious Personality
Ch. 8: Religious Excitation and Religious Fantasy
Ch. 9: The Decline of Symbolism
Ch. 10: The Failure of Imagination
Ch. 11: The Forms of Thought in Practice
Ch. 12: Art in Life
Ch. 13: Image and Word
Ch. 14: The Coming of the New Form
