While Huizinga paid attention to irrational aspects of human history, he was critical to the irrationalism of “philosophy of life.”Īt the age of sixty-five, Huizinga published another masterpiece, Home Ludens (1938). The work is primarily a study of history, yet it goes beyond the narrow disciplinary genre of history in the sense of the analytical, philological study of a series of events, and deals with interdisciplinary cultural realms where anthropology, aesthetics, philosophy, mythology, religious studies, art history, and literature are intertwined. His monumental work, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919) was written from this perspective. History, for him, was not a series of political events that lacked the vivid feelings and experiences with which one lives. With his literary skills, Huizinga succeeded in depicting how people in the past lived, experienced, and interpreted their cultural lives. He particularly focused on the sense of beauty and its artistic expressions and images. Rather, he tried to depict the states of human spirit and thought imbedded in dreams, hopes, fears, and anxieties. Huizinga refused conceptual schematization and patterning of history. He conceived history as the totality of diverse aspects of human life, including religious faith and superstitious beliefs, customs, constraints, the sense of morality and beauty, and other elements that constituted culture. Huizinga continued and developed Burckhardt’s approach and contributed to establish the genre of cultural history. Burckhardt was critical to modern philological and politics-centered approaches, and pioneered the cultural approach to history. Prior to Huizinga, in the nineteenth century Jacob Burckhardt pioneered and established the cultural approach to history. He died in De Steeg in Gelderland near Arnhem, and is buried in the cemetery of the Reformed Church in Oegstgeest. From this point until his death in 1945, Huizinga was held in detention by the Nazis. In 1915 he was made professor of general history at Leiden University, a post he held until 1942. He continued teaching as an orientalist until becoming the professor of general and Dutch history at Groningen University in 1905. It was only in 1902 when he turned his interest towards medieval and Renaissance history. He presented how all forms of human cultures emerged and developed as a modification and manifestation of playfulness.īorn in Groningen, Johan Huizinga started out as a student of Sanskrit and did a doctoral thesis on the role of the jester in Indian drama in 1897. In this work, he identified the essence of human beings with “ playfulness,” exhibited it as the primordial drive of human existence, and showed it as the archetype of diverse cultural forms. The work was the culmination of his studies as a cultural historian and a philosopher. Later in his life, Huizinga published Home Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1938). The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919), a masterpiece of cultural history which fused images and concepts, literature and history, and religion and philosophy, established Huizinga as the major cultural historian of the twentieth century, comparable with Burckhardt.
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