Johan Huizinga (date of birth: December 7, 1872; date of death: February 1, 1945) is a Dutch historian, philosopher of culture and one of the founders of modern cultural history. Adopting the point of view of his predecessor Jacob Burckhardt, Huizinga considered historical realities not only in the political, but also in the cultural spectrum. He first proposed to define history as the totality of all aspects of human activity, including religion, philosophy, linguistics, traditions, art, literature, mythology, superstition, and so on. Rejecting philological methodology, Huizinga tried to depict lives, feelings, beliefs, ideas, tastes, moral and aesthetic considerations through the prism of their cultural expression. He tried to compose a chronicle, with the help of which readers could feel the spirit of people who lived in the past, feel their feelings, understand their thoughts. To achieve this goal, the historian used not only literary descriptions, but also illustrations.
Creativity
"Autumn of the Middle Ages" (1919), a masterpiece of cultural history, combining concepts and images, literature and history, religion and philosophy, became the most famousHuizinga's work, bringing him fame as the founder of the history of cultures in the twentieth century and the heir of Burckhardt. Later, Johan Huizinga writes The Man Playing (1938). In it, he connects the essence of man with the concept of "playfulness", calls the game the primitive need of human existence and affirms it as an archetype of various cultural forms. Huizinga showed how all kinds of human cultures were born and evolved, remaining modifications and manifestations of playfulness.
Life
Johan Huizinga, whose biography is by no means replete with adventure, was born in Groningen, the Netherlands. During his university years he specialized in Sanskrit and completed his doctoral dissertation on "The Role of the Jester in Indian Drama" in 1897. It was not until 1902 that Huizinga became interested in the history of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He remained at the university teaching Oriental cultures until he received the title of professor of general and national history in 1905. Ten years later he was appointed professor of world history at the University of Leiden, where he taught until 1942. From that moment until his death in 1945, Huizinga was held in Nazi captivity in a small town near Arnhem. He is buried in the cemetery of the Reformed Church in the city of Oegstgeest.
Forerunner
Husinga's predecessor Jacob Burckhardt, who lived in the nineteenth century, first began to consider history from the point of view of culture. Burckhardt vehemently criticized the widespreadcontemporaries philological and political approaches to the consideration of historical realities. Johan Huizinga (photo) continued and developed the methods of his predecessor, forming a new genre - the history of cultures.
Unique Approach
History was viewed by him as a combination of many aspects of human life, including religious beliefs and superstitions, customs and traditions, social restrictions and taboos, a sense of moral duty and beauty, and so on. Huizinga denied the conceptual schematization and fitting of historical events to intuitive patterns. He tried to convey the state of the human spirit and thoughts through the dreams, hopes, fears and anxieties of bygone generations. He was especially interested in the sense of beauty and its expression through art.
Compositions
Using his unsurpassed literary skills, Johan Huizinga has managed to depict how people of the past lived, felt and interpreted their cultural realities. For him, history was not a series of political events, devoid of real feelings and sensations, without which no person can live. Huizinga's monumental work, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919), was written from this perspective.
This work should be considered primarily as a historical study, but it goes far beyond the narrow disciplinary genre of a historical essay as an analytical, philological study of a series of events. On the contrary: this work illuminates interdisciplinary cultural realities, where intertwinedanthropology, aesthetics, philosophy, mythology, religion, art history and literature. Although the author paid attention to the irrational aspects of human history, he was quite critical of the irrationalism of the "philosophy of life".
At the age of sixty-five, the historian published another masterpiece - the work "The Man Playing" (1938). It was the culmination of his many years of work in the fields of history and philosophy of culture. Huizinge also gained fame with the publication of Erasmus (1924).
Autumn of the Middle Ages
"Autumn of the Middle Ages" has become the most famous book of the historian. It was thanks to her that most of his contemporaries learned who Johan Huizinga was and were able to get acquainted with new trends in science.
Jacob Burckhardt and other historians considered the Middle Ages the forerunner of the Renaissance and described them as the cradle of realism. Burckhardt's work focused on the Italian Renaissance and almost did not cover this period in the cultures of France, the Netherlands and other European states north of the Alps.
Hizinga challenged the Renaissance interpretation of the Middle Ages. He believed that medieval cultures flourished and peaked in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and then declined in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. According to Huizinga, the historical period, like a living being in nature, is born and dies; that is why the Late Middle Ages became the time of the death of the period and the transition to a further revival. For example, in the chapter "The Face of Death" Johan Huizinga depicted the fifteenth century as follows: thoughts of death dominate the human mind, and the motif of the "dance of death" becomes a frequent plot of artistic paintings. He saw the gloominess, weariness and nostalgia for the past - symptoms of a fading culture - rather than signs of rebirth and optimism inherent in the Renaissance.
Despite the somewhat limited world view presented in the book "Autumn of the Middle Ages", it remains a classic work on the history of cultures and occupies a place of honor among the famous works of Jacob Burckhardt.
