The Autumn of the Middle Ages

Johan Huizinga, Rodney J. Payton, Ulrich Mammitzsch, Rodney J. Payton, Ulrich Mammitzsch

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780226359946, 9780226359922
• eBook ISBN: 9780226767680
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

"Here is the first full translation into English of one of the 20th century's few undoubted classics of history." —Washington Post Book World

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 fifteenth-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.

"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

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Translator's Introduction
• Preface to the Dutch Edition
• Preface to the German Translation
• Chapter One: The Passionate Intensity of Life
• Chapter Two: The Craving for a more Beautiful Life
• Chapter Three: The Heroic Dream
• Chapter Four: The Forms of Love
• Chapter Five: The Vision of Death
• Chapter Six: The Depiction of the Sacred
• Chapter Seven: The Pious Personality
• Chapter Eight: Religious Excitation and Religious Fantasy
• Chapter Nine: The Decline of Symbolism
• Chapter Ten: The Failure of Imagination
• Chapter Eleven: The Forms of Thought in Practice
• Chapter Twelve: Art in Life
• Illustrations Follow Page
• Chapter Thirteen: Image and Word
• Chapter Fourteen: The Coming of the New Form
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index