5/17/2023 0 Comments Medieval battlefields painting![]() ![]() These influences shaped Huizinga’s conviction that the essence of religion is purely transcendental, and that any worship extending beyond the recognition of God’s majesty is a diversion hence the many personal value judgments scattered throughout the discussion of religious practice in Herfsttij, which should not distract from the book’s enduring allure. ![]() Max Müller, one of the founders of the study of comparative religion. In the final section of the essay, I return to Huizinga’s personal views on religion, colored by his family’s Mennonite background, but even more, I argue, by his training in the study of Buddhism and the influence of the German-British scholar F. This “new religious history” abandoned those themes around 1980 to explore areas ignored by Herfsttij (heresy, gender, or interfaith relations), but more recent trends in the history of emotions, of the senses, and of religious art, may revive interest in Herfsttij, particularly by expanding the social horizon and including urban life. Several key themes of Herfsttij, like the danse macabre, the obsession with death, and the multiplication of funeral services, found their way into the new approaches to religious history developed from the 1960s onward by historians associated with the French Annales school. Although Huizinga frequently claimed that the autumnal metaphor (reflected in the original Dutch title: Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen) was purely representational, it permeated the book’s central argument and seemed to confirm older, mainly confessional treatments of the period as a time of religious atrophy and crisis. The essay examines the impact of Johan Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages (1919) on the historiography of religious life in late medieval Europe. In this work, he accordingly exposed the deadly logic of his contemporaries’ passionate and divisive embrace of the bellicose nationalist ideologies undergirding the war and the medieval continued to furnish the imagery, vocabulary, and emotional charge of wartime propaganda on the Western Front. ![]() Writing in the neutral Netherlands, and yet strongly attuned to the unfolding events around him, Huizinga both explicitly and implicitly sought to expose the dangers of locating the origins of modernity in an age of political, cultural, and moral decay. This chapter investigates the ways that Huizinga’s *Herfstttij der Middeleeuwen* functions as a critique of medievalism as it had developed in the decades prior to the war and during the war itself. Johan Huizinga conceptualized and composed his masterpiece, *Autumn of the Middle Ages*, during a Great War fought on medieval battlegrounds and on the very soil of the Burgundian borderlands whose decadent culture he had devoted himself to excavating. ![]()
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