Swanvale Halt Book Club: 'The Waning of the Middle Ages', Johan Huizinga (1919 - the Penguin edition, 1955/2001)

How can it be that, here I am, 52 years of age and with a history degree more than three decades behind me, and yet I had never read Huizinga's great classic until now? Of course I knew about it - and knew, too, the haunting phrase that summarises its case, that 15th-century Europe was redolent with 'the mingled scent of blood and roses' - but hadn't actually read it. At least, The Waning of the Middle Ages was the book I knew: it tends to be known as The Autumntide of the Middle Ages now, a more accurate translation of Huizinga's Dutch original, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen. And you will note that it's categorised as a Classic in the Penguin library, a sure sign that it's currently regarded more for its literary virtues than its strictly historical ones.

Huizinga's thesis was that late-medieval Europe was a decadent, worn-out culture whose fondness for ceremony, formality and fantastic artistic detail was a way of psychologically managing its tremendous violence and disorder. It was an exhausted age, incapable of originality, whose art was in decline and whose literature was dulled and stifling. Everywhere in the 15th century he looked, Huizinga saw corruption: it only remained for the Renaissance to come sweeping up from Italy to wipe away the Gothic north that had nothing left to offer humanity, and usher in a new and healthier age.

To demonstrate his case Huizinga barely strayed beyond the court of the Counts of Burgundy, which is undermining enough, but more radically his was a kind of history nobody writes any more; and nobody writes it because we don't feel confident enough to write it. Huizinga's sweeping characterisation of the culture even of one bit of medieval Europe, let alone the whole of it, is something nobody would pen now. He feels absolutely qualified to draw dramatic conclusions about society from his responses to this or that artwork, or the output of a handful of Burgundian poets and chroniclers: he looks back five centuries and can trace the outlines of a grand mental narrative from an aesthetic impression. It would be a bold commentator indeed who would dare to state, as Huizinga does, that an emphasis on the visual in culture is itself a marker of intellectual atrophy. Not only does nobody now trust their own responses in that way, but thinking about cultures in terms of 'rise' and 'decline' is alien to us. 

Or at least no historian tries to do so. Thinking about Waning led me to Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature which came out a few years ago and which had an even grander narrative, the alleged decline of social violence over the course of millennia - an equally contested suggestion. Of course Pinker is even less a historian than Huizinga was, a psychologist as against the Dutchman whose original training was in linguistics. Perhaps it takes non-specialists to be able to tell us fundamental stories about ourselves: I leave for another time the question whether we need them.