He was a professor of general history at Leiden University from 1915 to 1941. In a sense, this rendered him immune to changing fashion and imbued his work with a timeless and fresh appeal.On December 7, 2022, it will be one hundred and fifty years ago that Johan Huizinga - the Netherlands’ most important authority in the field of cultural history - was born in the city of Groningen. The reason why his work was given new importance in the nineties is undoubtedly connected with his study of history for history’s sake: not the wish to alter the present but to gain wisdom through the study of the past.
His broad outlook and interdisciplinary approach, his concern with intellectual history and his evocative style made him – despite his expressly conservative views – one of the most modern of Dutch historians. This debatable but masterly study helped to make his name as a cultural philosopher. In particular, the constitution, jurisprudence, warfare, culture in the narrower sense had their origin in serious games. Huizinga gained further international renown with his Homo ludens, in which he framed the bold hypothesis that culture has emerged in all the great civilisations in the form of a game. From then on, he was also considered a cultural critic. He wrote about this in his In de schaduwen van morgen ( In the Shadow of Tomorrow), a bestseller in Dutch and in many other languages. But he believed that he could detect disturbing developments even in his own west European cultural environment: the political system, the run-away economy, the daily press, radio and film, all filled him with grave concern.
That same year his critical biography of the great humanist Erasmus appeared, in English as well as in Dutch.ĭuring the 1930s, Huizinga grew increasingly perturbed by the course of events under Communism in the Soviet Union and National-Socialism in Hitler’s Germany. In 1924 he achieved international renown with Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen, in which he presented a dazzling panorama of the cultural history of France and the Netherlands in the age of the Dukes of Burgundy.
0 kommentar(er)
