david gary shaw, review essay, huizinga's timeliness

7/30/2019 David Gary Shaw, Review Essay, Huizinga's Timeliness

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REVIEW ESSAYS

HUIZINGK S TIMEL INESS

T H EAUTUMN AGES.By Johan H uizinga. Translated by Ro dney J .F T H E MIDDLEPaton and Ulrich Marnm itzsch. Chic ago: University of Chicago Press, 1 996 . Pp .xxii, 467 .A new translation of Huizinga's famous book is an occasion for reconsidera-tio11-and pleasure to o. Th e cha rm is still working , stirring people to the kind ofcommitment that few works of history achieve. What books do survive to givegood reading mo re than seventy-five years after their first appea rance? Not onlyis the new translation apt to increa se interest, but the old on e remain s in print andin paperb ack. W ha t is it that keeps the boat afloat? Histories do not by and largeweather as well as novels, poetry, o r philosophy. For wh ile most of those even-tually disapp ear, virtually all histories bec om e curiosities relatively quickly, du st-catchers waiting for the occasional scholar, dead-weights in the librarian's bud-get; and this is especially true of those solemn works of synthesis that surveyentire centuries.

The translators use much of their introduction to justify the new edition. I amnot sure they need to have don e so. The ir main reason is that the original trans-lation was n ot straightforward but constituted an ab ridgm ent of sorts. ' Huizinga'swords were sometimes curiously rearranged and Illany examples were cut. Thetranslators have restored both and added the translations of quotations that willmak e the text a mu ch better classroom book than it was. They have also mad e ago od job of it. If a work is worth reading it is worth having translated every gen -eration or so, but this begs the questio n: why is Huizinga worth reading w hile somany other historians will see no new editions, no reprints till the end of time?

Th e ans we r is both simp le and vague-a work must remain timely. availablefor a different readership and a new context. Either it is useful for doing historyor understanding how history is do ne o r it has so me other cach et. This questionis perha ps m ore pertinent in history than in many other fields. For few syntheticstudies in history are destined to remain alive: new facts occasionally force acha nge , but mo re crucially new m odels of interpretation annih ilate the interest ofmost old books. Many of those that have survived a century or more have doneso for reasons that can be considered external to the operations of professionalhistory. Hurne and Voltaire and Machiavelli wrote good history, but it is their

1 . The original edition was Heij'~t/"de i i i~ ii l i le l e e ~c n~e r~Haarlem. 1919); the English edit ion wasThe 1Ycriliizg of rile ~l"liilille ge.7, t rand . F. Hop~ i ian London. 1924) .


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246 D A V ~ D A RY SHALL'philosophical or intellectual reputations that buoy up all their other wo rks. Theirhistories become to a great extent historical documents rather than works ofrrctil3ehistory.

Gib bon and Livy represent a different but related category. Th eir histories areparadigmatic acts of writing. We would rarely assign them in class as a way tolearn what happened in the past or how to understand it, yet they retain a definitehistoriog raphical authority-classics, idols of history beautifidly calcified aspure literature. Gibbon is probably the lllost straightforward example becauseInany or most of the others , including Thuc ydid es, Herod otus, and Tacitus, actu-ally provide details and infornlation that are othe rwis e unkilown and presumablyunrecoverable. Arnong these latter writers we have an ongoing cognitive opera-tion of separating the organic fro m the fossilized, the seed con e from the am ber,the sonlething that is historically active, engaged with research agendas andteaching details, from the historically pcrssive, interesting for some other evi-dence-irrelevant reason.

The point is that within historiography there are multiple genres co-existing.Th ey are distinguished nlore by ou r locating them in different contexts and nich-es, different language games, than by what may seem intrinsic to them. Thisme ans that w e adm ire books in different ways and for substantially different rea-sons at different historical mornents. I have just suggested the crude activeipas-sive divide as one way to distinguish w orks w ithin the narrow am bit of the prac-tice of current researchers and teachers. Of course there are others. One of thetime s, however, that "canonical classicsn-books that wo n't quite go away-seem to influence active historiography is when they have initiated or crystallizeda field of inquiry. Thus Inany works on the Italian Renaissance do indeed startwith Burck hardt, for whether his detail is germ ane in the sam e way anym ore, hisinterpretation recolnnlends itself for discus sion . M oreo ver his conceptualizationand clarity of a rgum ent created the field of s tudy itself. Here, interestingly, thereis an active high-level role for the classics. They hav e typically m ade their argu-men t s fo rce f~~ l ly .art of what we may admire in Huizinga, Burckhardt, andGib bon , as with Tacitus o r Bede, is the clarity, reach , and indom itable quality oftheir accounts.

It is still neither disreputable nor quaint fo r an acad em ic historian to take on eof these books seriously. One nlust be more careful with Michelet, Hume, orHegel. Hurne, for example, wrote too broadly, covering the entire history ofEngland, with ~ u a n y lances to Scotland. He also wrote with a kind of decent andmodest tone that was witty and rarely harsh. He advanced a moderate thesis toeyes such as ours which have forgotten the Whig Supremacy. Thus his historyirritated only a few eighteenth-century Whigs, becoming serviceable and thensecondary to his philosophy as the nineteenth century wore on.' Finally, his

2 . On this history's editorial l ife, see David Hum e'\ Tiie Hi.ctoi? of Etiglciirrl fi.oiii tile liii,ri.ciorl o jJitliirs Crtesoi till the Rei'olittioii o f 1688 [I778 1 (Indianapolis. 1983 ). xi-xxiii: Dnvid Hlrine:Piri loso~~iri inlHi.\roi.iciii. ed. David F. Korton and Richard H . Popkin (Indianapol i \ . 1965). xxxi i:David Mho tton, "Da\ id Hume : The Historian," in Tiie C(ii17bridgeCoiiipiiiiioi~ o Hiiiiie, ed. D a\ id F.Norton (Cambridge. Eng. . 1993). 288-3 12: and Catherine M acaulay. who ie Hi.ttoi? of EirgIniicl,i,oi~i


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247UIZINGAS TIMELINESSvivacity as well as his detail and conception became outdated. Gibbon, by con-trast, created his subject, transposing Tacitus's sour end-of-the-world tone towha t he hoped was a real en d of sorts-the fall of the empire-go on as it wo uld .Th e subject lingers as a crucial them e even if his text is now a passive attendant.Burckardt's case is clearest, for he made himself synonymous with theRenaissance's arrival and its significance: a massive stream of literature andresearch flows from his work.

Th e place and pulse of Tlie A~ct~tmrzf the Middle Ages must similarly be takento establish how that book fares and what its future might be. Huizinga mayindeed be at a crossroads because while his big book has been enjoyed and used(albeit in a peculiar way), a reconsideration now might fashion a Huizinga whodid, eventually, inspire new research, a place in the project of active history. Inother words, the history of Tlze A L ~ ~ M I I ~ ~ Zf' t l~ eMiddle Ages may well be very dif-ferent from that of Tlze Wnriiizg of the Middle Ages.

I. HUIZINGA'S PAST

Th ere are many signs that Huizinga did define a dom ain of research by his force-ful ideas that we re worthy of attracting later criticism . M auric e Ke en, writing inCI~i\,ali-y1984), speaks mo re than once of the "great Huizinga" and his "classi-cal account of later medieval chivalry," which Keen is seeking to overthrow.' ToKeen, working on but on e central aspect of later medieva l culture, Huizinga is theprincipal and most worthy target for revision. Huizinga is mentioned on the firstpage of F. R . H. Du Boulay's An Age qf A~iibitiorz(197 0), blame d along withSha kesp eare and Bishop S tubb s for setting an "oppressive and negative tone"which D u Bou lay w ould undo. W hen scholars have written broadly of fifteenth-century culture, Huizinga is there, emi nen t, definitive, and impressive.-'But this is not quite the same position as Burckhardt retains. Oddly perhaps,Huizinga did not generate the kind of afterburn of students and research thatBurckhardt did. Critiques of Tlze Civilizotio~i f the Re~loisscrrlceiz Itcrly becamea wealth of cultural study and a massive historiography that has shaped not onlyour conflicted conceptions of the Italian Renaissance but of the Reforlnationwhich followed and the Middle Ages which preceded. Keen and DLIBoulay goback to Huizinga in part because the field is rather barren, prairie-land scrubstretching out before his isolated mountain on the horizon. Far from being thecreator of a fertile historical dom ain, Hu izinga sowed salt into the soil of the fif-

the Accec\-ioiz of Jriiiier I to tircir o f rile 81.1111s\1ick iile , 8 \,ols. (1763.1783) wa\ the great M'lligresponse to Hume. Hume referred to the difference in their "original principle\, which it will not beeasy to odju\t." r\e\en Letrrrc qf Dni.ic1 I-lrci,ie. ed. Raymond Klibansky and Ernest C. Mo\ \ne r (0xfot. t l.1954). 81.

3. Maurice Keen. C l i i ~ ~ n l i yNea Haven. 1981). 3 ant1 199.4 . F, R. H. Du Boulay. Air A ge qf Aiiihiri~11: iigli


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248 D A V ~ DGARY SHAM'teenth century. Du Boulay could write accurately that relatively little had beenwritten on it, and most that has sinc e appeared has been in the areas that Huizingadid not stress: economics, politics, and social h i ~ t o r y . ~ a morehe editor ofrecent collection of interpretations notes that later medievalists have become"res t ive under th is d isparageme~~t ."~ut few have been able to follow H uizingaor to substitute a compelling alternative vision.

Huizinga is certainly read, but he may often have killed off the desire to readfurt he r in the period, filled with its "tedious," "primitive" "excesses"-typicalHuizinga words. Two issues emerge then. First, we must give Huizinga his d uein understanding the book's complex success and wha t it augurs. Secon d, thereis a need to fix mo re clearly the place that this book fills and to a sk whether thatspac e is not likely to undergo a fairly radical transformation as the text is ingest-ed by a new readership in a new context, potentially becoming either the fill1Burckhardtian classic (unavoidable for the expert and seductive to all read ers), amolten M ichelet (all style), or a mirror of an E. A. Freeman work (dominant fora decade , dead for eternity, swept away by active historical am bition).

No reading of Huizinga ha s failed to find him definitive, even domine ering. H eknew w hat he was abo ut. As h e noted in his thoughtful lecture "The Task ofCultural History," a history often fails because it lacks a guiding assumption.However grand or small the topic seems, "In order to begin an analysis, theremust already be a synthesis in mind."' Inde ed, to many historians, if not readers,the powerful synthetic vision that suffuses his entire book may explain both itshold on general readers and the ambivalen ce of medieva l historians, uninterestedas they typically are in fine writing in itself or other peopl e's large id eas.

It is the Huizinga synthesis that fuels his prose and w e need to develop a senseof its richness, for it bore a startlingly coh eren t book. H uizin ga's appeal run s firstat the metahistorical level. H e is sure of the place of the fifteenth century in thehistory of European culture. Once one understands and accepts his fifteenth cen-tury, it is no surprise, no mistake, that the kinds of changes that grew acrossEurope by 1530 ensued. As revealing, however, was his decision to adopt theme taphor of seasonality (so meth ing he som ewhat regretted [xxi]), which m ade itinevitable and natural for a civilization to co m e to a crisis. W riting 011 Den is theCarthusian's work, for example, he notes that, "It has all the characteristics of alater work: summ arizing, concluding, breaking no new ground" (215). Havingthe synthetic picture, the confident category, Huizinga can assign the details ofthe period to their appropriate place. Denis the Carthusian becom es com prehen-sible and emb lema tic. A detail from the margin, Huizinga's Den is defines hisepoch's own m arginality.

In this context, it is always surprising to notice how little Huizinga actuallysays about the rest of the Middl e Ages, although it seeins clear enough that there

5 . Du Boulay, Age of Anrbitioii. Iff.6 . Fifieei?rli-Ccr~riii:~ ed. Rosemary H orrox (Cambrit lge, Eng.. 1993). 1.t i i r ~ l t l e ~ .7. Huiz inga. "The Task of Cultu ral Hi\tory." in Me11 iirril Iilecic: Histo,?, rile Miiltl ie A ges , rile

Rerzclistoi~c , trans]. Ja ~ n e s . Holm e\ and Jan \an Marler (New York. 1959). 25.


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249UIZINGA'S TIMELlNESSwas a time when medieval lifeforms were vibrant and real, were young. Heallu des to this, but sup presses it as if it were true but so me how irrelevant. Of wha tfollows the fifteenth century, howeve r, he is judicious and again som etim es indi-rect. T he early Renaissa nce is given a mixed judgment; only certain elem ents ofthe Rena issance constitute the flowing tide beneath the com plex, swirling, wind-driven surface action of humanism. The brief final chapter, "The Coming of theNew Form," consists of ten equivocal pages that argue that "the new arrives as afor m before it really beco me s a new spirit" (383 ). Inde ed, much of the chapteroutlines the fitful beginnings of a French hu ma nism that was still working in theservice of the old ideas. The culture changed before there was consciousness ofthe significance of the new. People had to discover what the new form could dobefore it becam e actualized for them. At that point, the new fo rm exposed the oldand its heavy spirit, rendering it uninteresting, neither effective, nor persuasive,nor charming. One believes Huizinga about the fifteenth century because hedoesn't seem to be a slave to the Renaissance.

Many brief accounts of the later Middle Ages have been written sinceHuizinga. T hey tend to fit into the larger historical story in two ways. First , thos ewho have written mainly of the Central (or tellingly Hi g h ) Middle Ages(1000-1250) prefer to avoid the later centuries, marginalizing Huizinga's age .Second, before the keen, recent interest in everyday life and social history, therecords of the later medieva l period we re quarried-as Huizinga criticizes(xiv)-mainly for politica l history, and a messy story that produ ced too. T h e fif-teenth century w as m ore often discussed as a justification for the transport tosummer, as prolegomenon to Renaissance and Reformation. Essential prepara-tion for understanding the new was to have a quick look at the grizzly old. Th ehistoriographical role was clear, and perhaps no one has had as much to do withthe con signm ent of the medieval to this auxiliary position in Eu rope an history asHuizinga. Nevertheless, he achieved something unusually potent by his willing-ness to step fully into a period that was closely associated with failure, with muchworth escaping, with darkness, and a wild pattern of wrinkles on a cheek sounlike our own .

Huizinga is not really interested in cha nge, however, even if his work fits nice-ly into a larger story that encompasses the supposed shift towards the modern.Nor is the dynamic by which his old forms are transformed clear or convincing.At the heart, his is a study in rzature r ~ o r t e ot transformation. T he m etaphors andimages rather than any extrinsic mechanism or explanation carry the weight ofmuch of the interpretation of medieval decline. For example, Huizinga conveysthe period's decline by his repetition of categories of excess. How often hespeaks of something being excessive, "over-," an "oversensitive mind" and an"overabundance of devotional content" (2 20 ). Mediev al tourna m ents we re "over-laden with embellishments" ( 8 3 , while the entire "knightly life form was over-burdened with ideals of beauty, virtue, and utility" (120 ). Th ese w ould be seduc -tive sentences regardless of the depth of the theory behind them , but they do infact lead us to the brink of Huizinga's central historical assumptions and their


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250 DAVID G A R Y SHAWunity and ubiquity help to explain why the book lies like a heavy snowfall overthe later medieval Burgund ian landscap e.

There was nothing new in giving a negative interpretation to the fifteenth cen-tury. That had been standard among liberal and Protestant historians for a longtime. But Huizinga 's cri tique of the Midd le Ages took a subtle form that helps toexplain why the boo k ha s never lost s om e appea l for historian s. I11 desc ribin g thedecline of the Mid dle Ages, exa mples of superstition and ecclesiastical stupiditywere traditionally given a very large place. Protestant historians, Enlighten men twriters, and their nineteenth-century liberal descend ants expected that the end ofthe medieval came when a process of intellectual uplift was undertaken: Valladiscovering that the d onation of Constantine was a fake; Luther short-circuitingthe shabby rationale of the medieval ecclesiastical mach ine; and every one notinghow the system had benefited the narrow interests of clergy and papacy. Reasonversus authority, know ledge versus superstition. Th is approach , quick and cut-ting, was especially appealing to those who needed a preface to vindicate thesuperiority of the mod ernity to follow.

Huizinga 's acco unt of later medieval decline does not, however, rest mainly onthis kind of argument. He shifts the ground almost wholly away from the evi-dence of the institutional church. To a significant extent, he abando ns w hat PeterBrown h as called the two-tier model of medieval religion. Thi s was the view thatthose who were educated could not do or believe the foolish things that thosesocially below them did and that they must therefore either have believed in amore mod ern fo rm of religion or have been explo iting the stupidity of their infe-r i o r ~ . ~ith o nly a few lapses, Huizing a treats the en tire culture as one o bject, asystem wholly contained within form s of life and culture. To understand how theculture was aging is to understand an entirety. a c o~ np le x f cultural form s thatwas as inevitable to "medieval man" or the "mind of medieval man" as was itseventual disappearanc e. The effect is pow erful. It depoliticizes the picture, side-stepping all sectarian and nationalist accounts. It draws the chu rch into the cu l-ture's coco on as an integral elemen t rather than as an especially corrupt and dorn-ineering external interest. T he widespread fraud an d duplicity assum ed in som eEnlighten men t and Whigg ish accounts are rendered irrelevant and superficial, asunconvincing as they were unsympathetic. Huizinga made understanding theentire culture-"an und erstan ding of contents" rather than of a "strictly closedcausality " of change-the cen tral wo rk of history ."T h e basis of change, the unity of the culture. the appealing rhetoric of excessare all the product of Huizinga's notion of historical forms. These are his greatmediating terms an d kinds. "The task of history" is , he argu es, "creating a mor-phology of the hum an past."i0 T he forlns absorb and o rganize the wealth ofdetail, but they a re not natural k inds. They are cultural produc ts, created by the

8. Peter R . L. B~.own.Tire Cltlr qfriie Saiiitc: lrc Ri.\-eni?tl Ftcricrioir iri Lritiir Ciii .is rioi iih (Chicapo.198 1) . 12-22.9 . H u i ~ i n g a . The Tark of Cultul.al History." 39.10. Ibitl.. 60.


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HUIZINGA'S T ~ M E L ~ N E S S 25 1historian's encounter with the past, the result of his ordering of the "facts." IfWittgenstein's forms of life are quotidian givens, Huizinga's are more clearlyorganizational categories projected or reflected by the synthetic historian on to hisor her materials. Thi s theory can be derived from Huiz inga 's relevant "T he Taskof Cultural History," although his practice in TIie Autunz~zof the Middle Ages ismore com plex, if not more coh erent.

Notwithstanding his eagerness to disavow anything artificial and abstract inthe orderin g of history-forms are not pu re subjectivity-Huizinga do es ass um ethat any particular cultural form includes an inherent possibility of perfection.His rather Kantian epistem ology includes an elem ent of the Aristotelian. A formcan, as we have seen, be overburdened. The language of perfection is the lan-guage of summer, of vernal possibility haunted by autumnal failure. All thismight be inconsistent." Inde ed, we might say that a cultural history who se rolewas merely to identify the forms of the past should not be able to judge them orassess them . Th e whiff of Aristotle is the license to judg e, and Huizinga doe s soconstantly: "The worship of nature was still too n~ecrk o take the beauty of theworld in all its nakedness into its service with,fiill co~z\~ictiorzs the Greek m indhad done: the idea of sin was too yo\r,erlf~tl for that" (41-42, my emphases).Comparatives, superlatives, markers of deviation from a mean that is the perfectway for a form to be are strewn throughout. By what w arrant, however, are formscriticized if they are the historians' own construction? There is something con-siderably m ore durable abo ut forms than Huizinga's som ewha t constructivist the-oretical remarks allow.

Going somewhat deeper, we can see how forms constitute the cultural. Theyare historical a rtifacts discovered fr om the d etails by the historian, but they act asguides to action and creation in the historical time under examination. In thisguise, they are not unlike no rms. They change and eventually dissolve and thatcontributes to epoc hal shifts in history, to the cha nge in civilizations. But they d oso by becorning detached from their habitual practices or by bec oming abused,unable to restrain wh at people do with them and consequently ending up withoutvitality. As Huizinga notes, "The world was perfectly pictured through that all-encomp assing sy n ~ b o l i sn ~ ,nd the individual sy n~ bo lsurned into petrified flow-ers" (240 ). Th is aesthetic gap-between the for m or score a cultu re has producedand subse quen t perform ances of it-is wha t justifies the book 's them e of declin e,really of a decline in taste and judg me nt. As the form s' vitality fails, the medievalways be com e exhausted. Plainly, a more dyn amic m odel would allow that therewere only performances on theines of unknown provenance, that it is all inorejazz improvisation than classical precision. Huizinga, however, is cominitted tothe form s, to a variety of c reate d, historicized abstractions.

A special factor was at play in the Middle Ages that complicated the wayforms worked. The period, he argues, was committed to the master intellectual

11. The form of l i fe appears in his historical u\age to be much more organic than in hi\ theory,where lie was perhaps more concerned to disa\.;ociate him\elf from a \cientific o r mythological kindof historical structure


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252 DAVID GA RY SHALL'for m of realism, which generated ' 'an unlimited desire to bestow fo rm on every-thing that is sacred, to give any religious idea a material shap e so that it exists inthe mind like a crisply painted picture" (173). Prevalent philosophical realismmeant the raising of every detail of life and nature to the highest significance.Any relationship was possible. Philosophy authorized the linkage of anything toalmo st anything else via only the slightest correspondence s. Th e world hadbecome too rank, a coinpost heap of culture. "Everything had been expressed soco~np le te lyn image, legend, and prayer that it was no longer sustained by grip-ping awe. The veneration of the saints no longer had any roots in somethingunformed or unexpressed" (202).Th e master form of realism cultivated a kind ofmaterialist expression of everything which drained real significance from the civ-ilization's repertoire of forms. Generally, Huizinga has invested playing withinthe form with the highest cultural and aesthetic value.

Huizinga's synthetic vision is a very cornmanding one, then. He has generat-ed assun~p t ionshat allow him to bring the fifteenth century to judgment, but toa remark able extent on its own terms since the forins that are discerned w ithinthe culture provide the basis for assessing the culture's success and trajectory.Becau se the f o m s are indigenous to the medieval period, because the age willhang itself, it is worthwhile abiding w ith it, giving it mo re c areful attention thanwas habitual, even if the later medieval period is often "tedious and disappoint-ing." Like shrewd inquisitors, Huizinga's forrns (the real fathers of historicalmethod) ask the questions, but the evidence flows from the authentic witnessitself. The century is judged by the darnage it has done to its otvri norms, itsforms. The historian's modern judgment can be seen as deriving from the aes-thetic knowledge of what living within a form in any period would lo ok like. Th econtenlporary historian c an thus judge according to a universalizing aesthetic cri-terion even as the historicized values and details of the past are re-affirmed in theauthentic historical forms.

11 HU IZINGA'S PRESENT AND FUTU RE

Notwithstanding the vigor and depth of his philosophy of history, Huizinga hashad a hard time influencing practicing historians. Norman Cantor, for instance,wh o rightly masginalizes him in his acco unt of medieval history in the twentiethcentury, sniffs abo ut his reliance on printed materials.I2 Los t fro m this point ofview is Huizinga's innovative and inassive exploitation of vernacular materials,his violation of that odd line that has separated m edieval historians (and their typ-ically Latin materials) from their early modern colleagues and those in English,French, and German departments." It was an innovation obscured by othertrends in historiography. But it points us to a story of failure in the m idst of suc-

12. Norman Cantor. Iizi.eiifi i~g fire Mid tlle Age.\: Tile L il vs , Il'orks ciild Iileos of rile GrecirMeiliei'iilisrr of rile T~1,ei7rietlz eii r~ ii? ,N e w York. 1991 ). 377-382.13. B. L. Manning. The People'.\ - Fctiiil iii rite T iiile of Il


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HUIZINGA'S TIMELINESS 253cess. Huizinga's sources and his focus on cultural forms came at the cost ofdownplaying the socioeconomic factors that were about to sweep historiansaway. Th us even though H uizin ga's seiisitivity to cu lture and mentality paralleledthe contemporary work of Bloch and later of Kantorowicz. his eschewal of poli-tics and new-m odel social history cu t him loose from the decisive developmentsthat Bloch engendered."

At the level of active history Huizinga was untimely. He was in touch withBurckhardt's assumptions and methods but unfortunately chose a subject lessdecisive and less productive in the central plot of European history. He had hismodest p lace, but he failed to catch the wave of social and intellectual history thatwas to be the mainstay of medieval history for the long middle of the twentiethcentury. Even a work of history rises or falls on the usual questions of context.How does the subject fit into its world? Will people respond and how much'?Hard things to predict and certainly poor guides to good, honest work. Yet thesedetermine a book's life. David Hurne developed his history increasingly awayfrom Scotlan d towards Englan d, whose history "mattered." and he knew how toread the interest that a subject would have. He advised his friend WilliamRo ber tson aga inst the history of Cha rles V. which he wrote nevertheless, butwhich we don't read. It would not bear up, Huine said. It hasn't. '"

Nevertheless. if The Wnnilzg of tlze Mirlrlle Ages didn't become fertile historybut the essential com plem ent instead. a piec e of the rising a rch of modernity, thatis not what readers will most notice, m arvel at, and even thrill to if they just nowenco unter the book. H uizinga is cutting-edge stuff. T he theory may be w rong. tooholistic for most tastes today. but historians have not usually determined whatwas effective history only by ideological or theoretical criteria. Subject has mat-tered too. From that perspective, Huizinga inay well have been ahead of his time.but in step with us . One kind of honest reaction to Tlie Autl~ln nof the Middle Ageswould be to embrace it not for its architecture and general vision, but for itsdetails and hints. its choice of relevant texts and topics. Huizinga inay be readyto enter the research stream in a way that eluded him in his Wnrlirzg days.

Articles on subjects pioneered by Huiziilga now fill the best journals, oftenwith no apparent knowledge of his contributions on the part of their authors. Letme briefly outline this contemporary catalogue that recapitulates his advancedinsights. for here is the Huizinga for our times. It is almost uncanny to see histhoughtful care over some of the very subjects that have lately becomerespectable: hair styles. fashion, quasi-erotic blood brotherhoods, and sports.I6

14. Marc Bloch had p ublished Ler Rois thaici,~iitrriges (Strasbourg, 1924); and K antorouicz . TileKiiig'r T,i,o Boclies (Princeton, 1957): Lucien Febvre. Le pioDl?iiie tle I'iiici.o!c~iice iilr XVIe siecle, in/.eligioii iie Rtrbelnis (Paris. 1947).

15. "I o u n I like less pou r project of the Age of Charle s the V. That sub.ject is disjoin ted, and yo urhero, wh o is the so le conn ection , is not very interesting." Tlie Let te ic o jD ii l' ii 1 H L L I I I ~ ,d . J . Y. T.Greig(Oxford. 1932). I. 315.

16. A brief list of examp les: Robert Bartlett. " Sym bolic Mea nings of Hair in the Middle Ages."Ti.cri7siictioil~of flie Ro!nl Histoiictrl So c i e f ~ .ser. vi (19 94 ). I\', 43-6 0; Pierre Cha plais, PieicG/ii,esroir: G li i~ ir it l 1's Ac1oprir.e Biot/zei.(Oxford. 1994 ); on sport. a tiny inedieval foothol d in a g r o u -


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254 DAVID GARY SHAWHis general concern for ordinary life was turned-as it has been lately-to theservice of cultural history rather than the socioeconomic use that it mainlyencom passed in its Annales mo de (120-125). Other insights fit within recent revi-sionary work , such as the linking of the persecution of witches and hom osexuals,a theme con gruent with the work of Robert Moore.I7

Other touches w ould hav e fit best with innovations advanced by historians lessrecently but also since Huizinga wrote. For instance, Huizinga mirrors Febvre'squestioning the depth of Christianization in the medieval period. His concernwith honor anticipates much of the work that has moved from anthropology intohistory (73). It was an ap t subject for this armchair ethnographer of the fifteenthcentury. S o too was his stro ng general argum ent for the study of daily life overtraditional political concerns, a tendency he developed well beyond hisBurckhardtian model. s

This is of co urse more than a m inor insight. Huizinga believed, as perhaps wewould not, that the history of politics rendered invisible and therefore unprob-lematic the sizable gap in sensibility that stands between the twentieth and fif-teenth centuries (8-9). Th e turn fro m chronicle sources to poetry and the m inordetail was a window onto the difference of the past, a turn from a sociologicalposture to an anthropological one. It also anticipated the cultural history of the1990 s and historicized literary studies. Furtherm ore, Huizinga's is an insight thatacknowledges the gap between periods, the basis of our failure to understandthem-the othe rs within the sam e tradition. By novel techniques and detailed andsym pathetic examina tion, Huizinga revealed the la te medieval as a deeply differ-ent period rather than just a failed one. Bu t he a lso showed that sympathy couldthrive with judgment-perhaps a tone echo ing Tylor or Frazer mo re thanRadcliffe-Brown or Evans-Pritchard. But this tone and language of judgmenthave turned out to be much less appea ling; his rhetoric, unlike his subjec ts, rancounter to the quiet and careful tone that modern historical science was just atthat time settling into.

The oddity of Huizinga's old-fashioned rhetoric is, therefore, that it has hid-den and obscured the newfangledness of many of his ideas and his bold, some-times visionary subjects. These turned out to be untimely in a wholly oppositeway-too early. Nevertheless, Huizinga hold s attention because of the coherenceand de pth of his synthetic vision. This contributes to his ongoing relevance with-in the metahistorical and summary judgments on the period. Yet it also con-tributes to the marginalization of his work within the context of active academ ic

ing general field is Mark Bailey, "Rural Society," Fifieenth-Century Attitudes, ed. Houox, 163-164;Sus an Cran e, "Clothing and Gen der Definition: Joan of Arc," Journal of Medieval and Early ModernStudies 26 (1996). 297-320.

17 . Robett Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Sociery; Power and Deviance in WesternEurope, 950-1250 (Oxford, 1987 ).18. This field is now massive; a good ex amp le is Heinrich Fichtenau, Living in the Tenth Century:Mentalities and Social Orders, trans]. Patrick Geary (Chicago, 199 1).


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255UIZIKGR S TIMELINES Shistory. T he details have m attered less than the vision. and the tone and the prosehave see me d to som e, unfortunately, to matter m ore than th e history.

The future of The Ai~tunznof the Middle Ages will be decided by whetheracknowledgment of Huizinga as our Doktorvater is possible. faced as we arewith his stern and all too paternal tones and pro se:What are we to make of the peculiar rashness that is continuously revealed in the superfi-ciality, inexac tness, and cred ulity of the wa ning M iddle A ge s? It is almo st as if they hadnot even the slightest need for real thought, as if the passage of fleeting and dreamlikeimages provided sufficient nourishment for their minds. Purely outward circumstances,superficially described: that is the hallmark of scribes such as Froissart and Monstrelet.(283)

What are we to do with the condescension, fused as i t is with his so~nehowthreatening stylishness?S o intense and colorful w as life that it could stand the mingling of the sm ell of blood a ndroses. Between hellish fears and the most childish jokes, between cruel harshness and se n-timental sym pathy, the peop le stagger-like a giant with the head of a child, hither andthither. Between the absolute denial of all worldly joys and a frantic yearning for wealthand pleasure, between dark hatred and merry conviviality, they live in extremes. (24)

Language this evocative, inflamed with judgment, and yet still suggestive,characterizes his style, and exam ples could be multiplied a hundred times with-out exhausting them. Ev en if the metahistorical place of the fifteenth century ha shelped Huizinga, even if he could properly now be seen as the lost grandfatherof current fifteenth-century c ultural history. his prose and o pinions m ay con tinueto have a negative influence o n the reception of his w ork. Th e professional his-torian especially, just that person w ho fo r goo d or ill has the reins of th e chariotof historical interpre tation, has been repelled by this. Ther e are two issues thatneed consideration. First. there is the writing, so g ood, so shapely. Th en there isthe opin ion, the willin gne ss, even the imperative. to writ e to judgment-all thoseadjectives, and especially, but typically the adjective "childish".19 He is startlingto a world of authorial invisibility.

T h e center of his untimeliness is the fusion of two shibboleths of European let-ters, poetical prose-writing a nd the incisive judgm ent of an individua l and know-ing author. Why these things should so disturb us and seem acceptable only inhistorical context is too deep a question to treat fully here, but certainlyHuizinga's fault is that he was as late as the world he was s tudying.Notw ithstanding som e new w ine, he put it in handsom e old bottles. quaint, evenmoving in a sentimental kind of way. Huizinga reads like a nineteenth-centurywriter, a restrained romantic stylist fitted with an Enlightenment predilection forjudging and the superior tone. Huizinga is perhaps the last succes sf~il xample of

19. Even here Huizinga finds a recent lost relation in Charles Radding. "Superstition to Science:Nature, Fortune. and the Passing of' the Medieval Ordeal." Anlericnn Hirror.ic~i1Revie!!' 84 (1979),945-969, wh o has arg ued. influenced by Piaget, that mediem 1 people had a childlike sense of' moralcausality that explains their belief in ordeals till the thirteenth century.


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256 DAVID GA RY SHAIT'each of these two tendencies, a little odd in his combination of them. Forwardand "new" as his work is in so many ways, he reads old.

It is not easy to see how we can get around the problem in order to redeemHu izinga without turning a much larger corner that s om e people have lately beenrounding, or th inking about r o ~ n d in g . '~or a long time now historians and espe-cially philosophers of history have been criticizing the objectivity acc ount of his-tory. One of the many sources of that orthodoxy's prose style is crucial: the sci-entific model that positivism (and natural science) promoted. The goal of theacquisition of know ledge displaced an earlier historiography whose ancient endswere to provide mernory of past deeds and lessons for living. both aims inflect-ed w ith value. O nc e that chang e became an age nda of research. prose ran all themore quickly towards the neutral, just as the modeling of practice did. Into his-tory was built and reinforced the lnanner of scie nce , the flavor of obje cts, an atti-tude of mere observation of the things of the world. The researcher was the per-son who found and refurbished facts before handing them over for use in thebuilding of the house of history. Whatever the theory's effectiveness or truth,objectivity and the model of science had a serious impact on the writing of his-tory. Other trends ran the same way: fiction's omniscient but self-effacingobservers were also growing throughout the nineteenth century, providing mod-els of disinterested control with the moral, social, and political agendas heavilybut now surreptitiously de termine d. Even as Henry Jam es took the narrator awayinto observing reticence, he never ceased to refer to novels as histories.

Th e objectivity I 'm pointing to has, therefore, only a limited conn ection to thedebates we associate with Histof? cinrl Tl~eol-y r Nov ick's big boo k.?' Rather.objectivity returns exactly to the questions that Hayden White initiated and to itsfund am ental sense of discou rse rooted in object as oppose d to sub ject. T heimportance of White's analysis of such a scientific classic as Darwin's TlzeOrigin of Species was in part the proof it provided that any kind of literature wassusceptible to such an analy sis, and all history.?'A rhetorical a ~l al ys is f a paperfrom the cui-rent issue of Brrrin would be even m ore effective in makin g the point.Eve n after Kuhn , after Feyerab end, after scientists have grown slowly mo re selfconscious of the subjective aspects of their work, the pernicious power of theirrhetoric and that of other reporting has not come under similar attack. "Just thefacts, ma'am " is a request for a tone, for a supp ression, for a certain kind of on to-logical innuend o that m akes little sens e within historical wo rk. There is nothing

20. M'orks suc h Sim on Sch am a. Denci Cer.tciiritie.5: Ur~n~cii.i.cii~tecls Spec~rliirioiis (Nea York ,199 I) ; Barbara Hanawalt . G r ~ ~ : i i l g iir iLlediel'o/ Loiiiloii: Tlie Ex pr .ie iic e o f Cliililliooel iii Hirtoi?(Oxford, 1993); Johli Demos. Ei~rermiiiiiz~q Cnptiiv (Newnrntl (Oxford. 1982) and Th e Ui~i.ecleeiii~clYork, 1994) are ex a~ np le s f recent histories that play with f ict ional i ty.

7 1 . Peter Novick, Tlinr 1Voh1e Drentii: The "O /~ je c~ ti l, ihrtesriori " criiil rlie Aiiic~ricntiHi.~ror.icnlPi~fess iotr(Cambridge, Eng. . 1988).22. See Hayden White, "Fict ions of Factual Representat ion," Tropics of Discolci.se: E.\sny.c it1Cirlriii.nl Ci.iticisrii (Bal t imore , 1978), 121- 134.


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257UIZINGA'S TIMELINESSutilitarian there; history has little interesting in the way of facts, although it hasmany of those. Its interesting facts, however, ar e all challeng ing interpretations. '"

Long schooled in the objective tone, if not its genetic roots or philosophicalconsequences. historians bristle at the kind of comfortable forcefulness thatHuizing a display s, always willing to judge. and perhaps m ore galling still, know -ing how and why he judged. H e was sure of himself. Here ag ain, he is Tylor, w eEvans-Pritcha rd. The anthrop ological and scientific posture w as an effective onefor not intruding. for not judging or seeming to judge, for r ~ o tbeing there. It isall the Inore striking, then, that while the theory ha s collapsed an d its collaps e hasbec om e itself a principal theoretical con cern, it has not been followed u p by therapproche ment of research and writer. Th e ultimate challenge for Huizinga inaywell be to find the scholarly world tran sformed into a place of sharp and person-al prose, of as Inany quirks on the page as there are quirks in the classroom.Editing for co nformity of style, for the reduction of personality, will help to mar-ginalize Huizinga. and it may also smothe r us in the easy mantle of a rhetorical-ly insensitive people, hiding what matters as many dominant and homogeneousregimes do.

If w e can allow that history writing is not philoso phic ally objective or neutral.notwithstanding its constant involvement with reference to the past, then whatprecisely is it that we ob ject to in Huizinga? Be ing wrong doesn't seem en ou gh,since scholars habitually find the stan ce, large ideas, and particular argum ents oftheir colleagues defective or wrongheaded. Perhaps Huizinga's manners nowseem bad and we had rather not invite him back, but it may also be true thatwe 've ma de things too easy for ourselves by not encouraging strong, well-devel-oped f av or s. At the very time that positivism was grow ing, smooth. easy, blend-ed whisky was driving single malts fro is^ popularity. But we may well need toyield a little ground to the peaty. acidic single malts like Huizinga, and the basisof our evaluation of boo ks m ay nee d to return m ore explicitly to their artfulnessand their rneans of making their points. The path of symbols and metaphors,organization as ~ n u c h s research. shapes the s tory. I t is not a matter of bad orga-nization or bad w riting: those a re small issues. It really is a question of how wetake strong stories and whether or not we encourage them for their specialinsights. Maitland is one of us at work; Hu izinga o n the weeken ds, at the table,when we're honest . Som e of us are Mait lands in al l our mom ents , but unless wechan ge the mo dels of active history writing-possibly to the detrim ent ordestruction of much academic history-Huizinga's future is d i ~ n m e r han itmight b e. He'll bec om e the minor classic, a sad fate. Th e repellent beauty of hiswriting will keep us shy and consign him to literature, history that has mo ved outof relevance to the active historian to be picked up by the active historiographeror literary historian. If history is, however, as Huizinga himself thought. "theinterpretation of the significance that the past ha s fo r us" rath er than a mere m at-

23. Nelson Goodman. Wi~ sofl l 'orl i lr i~nki t~gIndianapolis. 1978) is the most pl.o\'ocative place toglimp se the theory behind this iclea.


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258 DAVID GARY SHAWter of facts, there is something perverse about the conservativeness of ourapproaches. the intolerant quality of our all too well-schooled eyes.?-'

What does it mean to place values into history? We have oddly been betterover the last decad es at knowing that values are there, em bed ded in metahistori-cal structures, in texts, in ideology, than at becoming comfortable with the factthat they are inevitably there. not em barrassingly there. O ne of the achievenlentsof deconstructivists. of postm odernists a nd other pro vocateurs is that they k nowthese concerns are crucial, that what one thinks here may affect what one saysthere. that selectivity of facts is license to mana ge the truth. History needs som ehonesty about the seriousness of its calling at a time wh en the assum ption of asimple objectivity is gone. This is where culture came in on the old worldaccount that we may rapidly be returning to. Culture enabled value, enabledjudgment.

Whether or not we are comfortable with the rhetoric of value that Huizingaexemplifies, he may show us that we can be both critical. careful, sensitive, imag-inative. and born e alo ng by a shrewd sensibility that mak es value crucial to thebusiness of understand ing the past and ren ders its concerns pertinent to the pres-ent. Th e more w e know about the tricks that prose plays. how a nd wh y rhetoricmatters. that every "fact is a sma ll theory,"" the mo re it may seen1 necessary tooverthrow the deceptive line of the anonymous posture, rooted as it is in thatobjectivity that is at least as sedu ctive as it is habitual and that thrives cunn inglyin prose even w hen it has collapsed in theory.

For Huizinga to matter so much requires not only more acknowledgn~enthathe ha s many specific insights into the new evidence that ha s sw ept fifteenth-cen-tury cultural history, but that we can receive him once more as a kind of con-temporary, G rosvater Joh an. It may be w orth it because even when skulking. weeventually give ourselves away. There are new achievements even as there willbe new stand ards of failure dow n this path of "innovation." Perh aps the riskwould be worth it . Irritate a reader: surprise yourself; show some self. It willmake it easier for us all to know what you mean, and why, in resisting your book ,we emerge more fully ourselves.

We.rlej3a~zniversity

24. Huir inpa. "The Ta\k of Cultural History," 58.25. I have been unable to trace this quotation but believe it is Nelson Goodman's

david gary shaw, review essay, huizinga's timeliness

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