Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Still useful after all these years, August 20, 2001
In this venerable if somewhat dated work, Huizinga examines the social and cultural life in France and the Low Countries during the late Middle Ages (14th and 15th centuries). Court chronicles, legal documents, religious treatises and orations as well as works of poetry and art are scrutinized for their abiliy to shed light on the codes of behavior that ruled people's lives. Literary sources from the Roman de la Rose to the ballads of François Villon to simple folk tales and proverbs are searched for clues to medieval thought and conduct. Predictably, these sources reveal more about the aristocracy and church hierarchy than about the common man; and in the case of court historians, allowance must be made for hyperbole and embellishment.
Keeping all this in mind, Huizinga discerns a gradual rigidification of all manifestations of life: faith degenerates into superstition, love of beauty into ostentatious display, models of conduct deteriorate into empty formalism. Once-vital expressions of love, piety, courage and honor become so stylized that they lose all meaning. Profanation of the sacred, blasphemy and idolatry abound. Itinerant preachers whip up mass hysteria; witch hunts and prosecution of heretics are the predictable result. In the arts, excessive and repetitive use of imagery and allegory stifles creative impulses. Huizinga sees the best of the late-medieval spirit preserved in the visual arts, especially Flemish painting, rather than in the literary forms, which he pronounces "tiring and boring". The reader is inclined to agree.
While the "gods of antiquity" were never completely lost in the Middle Ages - only forced underground - a "new tone of life" had to emerge before the Renaissance could take hold.
For budding medievalists and Renaissance scholars, this book is still an indispensable study guide, mainly because of its abundant source material; but it requires patience and perseverance on the part of the reader. The translation is sometimes a little murky and contains some inaccuracies, especially in the copious Latin and French quotations. This detracts only slightly from the Herculean effort of rendering an older canonical work into fluent English.
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24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
superlative, February 5, 2004
Though this book is absolutely excellent (though the style takes a little getting used to), it shouldn't be the first book you read on the Middle Ages.I say that not so much because the book is difficult, as because it's elliptical. The book has a lot of discussion about themes prevalent in the art and literature of the later Middle Ages, but it's not a "history": it doesn't tell you what happened. For example, to make a point about fastidious medieval protocol, Huizinga relates an anecdote about the battle of Crecy. But he never explains what the battle was, who fought in it, or why it was important. He assumes you already know that stuff, so don't come to this book looking for a more straightforward history. This is more a discussion of the major themes and movements of the age, divided by chapter.
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36 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Abridgement of "The Autumn of the Middle Ages", August 1, 2003
1. As the Introduction to "The Autumn of the Middle Ages" makes abundantly clear, "Waning" is an abridgement. Huizinga thought that Americans were too impatient to savor his "Autumn" at length. 2. "Autumn" is available complete in a new translation, ISBN:0226359948. You can review the text here at amazon.com. 3. Huizinga admits that the word "Autumn" indicates that he may have been influenced by certain biologistic theories about cultural decline. My guess is that he alludes to "Der Untergang des Abendlandes" -- "The Decline of the West", Oswald Spengler's gripping, but far-fetched theory of deterministic cycles in cultural history based on little more than using the seasons as a metaphor. 4. Huizinga himself however was no determinist or believer in the tides of history. His clear-eyed anti-Nazi stance made him a top target of Hitler's thugs after the fall of Holland. The elderly humanist scholar, ejected from his university, was kept under house arrest where he died in 1944. 5. Finally, to extend the metaphor of autumn, Huizinga proposed to study a medieval culture, the Burgundian, over-ripe and lingering on a drying vine. Meanwhile the sun of the Renaissance blazed in Italy and the clouds of the West's first true proliteriat brooded over their water-driven looms in Belgium, the Netherlands, and western Germany.
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