Background
Johan Huizinga was born on December 7, 1872, in Groningen, Netherlands. He was the son of Dirk Huizinga, a professor of physiology, and Jacoba Tonkens, who died two years after his birth.
9712 CP Groningen, Netherlands
Johan Huizinga entered in 1891 the University of Groningen, earning his degree in Indo-European languages in 1895.
Augustusplatz 10, 04109 Leipzig, Germany
Johan Huizinga studied comparative linguistics at the University of Leipzig.
(This brilliant portrait of the life, thought, and art in ...)
This brilliant portrait of the life, thought, and art in France and the Netherlands in the 14th and 15th centuries is our most trenchant study of that crucial moment in history when the Middle Ages gave way to the great energy of the Renaissance. From an analysis of the dominating ideas of the times - those that held the medieval world together, supported its religion and informed its art and literature - emerges the style of a whole culture at the extreme limit of its development.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MFCJ4GA/?tag=2022091-20
1919
(In the Shadow of Tomorrow, first published in 1936, is a ...)
In the Shadow of Tomorrow, first published in 1936, is a commanding analysis of the Western world in the midst of modernity.
https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Tomorrow-Diagnosis-Modern-Distemper/dp/1950970116/?tag=2022091-20
1935
(In Homo Ludens, the classic evaluation of play that has b...)
In Homo Ludens, the classic evaluation of play that has become a “must-read” for those in game design, Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga defines play as the central activity in flourishing societies.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001PSEQT2/?tag=2022091-20
1938
(This collection by the distinguished Dutch historian Joha...)
This collection by the distinguished Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) reflects the theme of its key essay, The Task of Cultural History", throughout its pages. Huizinga's conception of cultural history informs both his essays on historiographic questions and those on such figures as John of Salisbury, Abelard, Joan of Arc, Erasmus, and Grotius.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691640041/?tag=2022091-20
1959
Johan Huizinga was born on December 7, 1872, in Groningen, Netherlands. He was the son of Dirk Huizinga, a professor of physiology, and Jacoba Tonkens, who died two years after his birth.
Johan Huizinga attended the municipal Gymnasium and entered the University of Groningen in 1891, earning his degree in Indo-European languages in 1895. His early interest was history, but at the gymnasium his teachers had been so poor, that he changed into linguistics.
Huizinga then studied comparative linguistics at the University of Leipzig, and after returning from Germany he earned his Ph.D. in 1897. Huizinga's dissertation dealt with the clown figure in Sanskrit drama.
Later in life, Huizinga received his honorary doctorates from the University of Oxford, and University of Tuebingen.
Johan Huizinga began his career as a high school teacher in Haarlem and a teacher of Indic studies in Amsterdam in 1897. His interests soon turned to the history of his own country, however, and in 1905 he published "The Origins of Haarlem". The same year he was appointed professor at Groningen University; in 1915 he was named professor at Leiden University. He worked there until it was closed in 1942 during the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II. He was also an editor of the magazine De Gids from 1916 to 1932 and published many famous works during that time.
Huizinga's first major work, and his greatest, was "The Waning of the Middle Ages" (1919), in which he portrayed the forms of life, thought, and art in the Burgundian state of the 14th and 15th centuries. He saw it as a period of violence, terrified by the image of death, from which men escaped by creating a "dream of life", coloring life with fancy. By their idealized style of knighthood, their conventions of love, their images of religious sensibility, they transformed or hid the real world in which they lived. Huizinga recaptured these colors of late medieval life with the great vividness of style.
In "Homo Ludens" (1938) he addressed the problem directly: to what extent does human culture result from play and to what extent does it express itself in the forms of play?
Huizinga also wrote "Men and Mass in America" (1918), a biography "Erasmus of Rotterdam" (1924), "Dutch Civilization in the Seventeenth Century" (1941), and numerous essays on historiography and the contemporary scene. He also wrote about the national characteristics of early America and traveled to the United States in 1926.
In 1938 Huizinga became vice-president of the International Committee of Intellectual Cooperation with the League of Nations. Alarmed by the rise of fascism and cultural crisis Huizinga wrote "In de schaduwen van morgen" (1935), which his son Jacob Herman Huizinga translated into English under the title "In the Shadow of Tomorrow".
When Leiden University was closed by the Germans, Huizinga was interned as a hostage. Released for reasons of ill health, he died in the village of De Steeg on February 1, 1945.
(This brilliant portrait of the life, thought, and art in ...)
1919(In Homo Ludens, the classic evaluation of play that has b...)
1938(This collection by the distinguished Dutch historian Joha...)
1959(In the Shadow of Tomorrow, first published in 1936, is a ...)
1935In 1942 Huizinga spoke critically of his country's German occupiers, comments that were consistent with his writings about Fascism in the 1930s. He was held in detention by the Nazis between August and October 1942. Upon his release, he was banned from returning to Leiden.
Like Swiss historian Jacob Christoph Burckhardt, Huizinga was a cultural conservative, strongly elitist, and in later years deeply despondent over the future of European civilization. Like Burckhardt, he took as his professional task the description of periods of cultural history. In his works, he reinterpreted the Late Middle Ages as a period of pessimism and decadence rather than rebirth.
Whereas the Swiss historian had conceived of culture as the spontaneous creation of free individuals, Huizinga defined culture as the state of a community when the domination of nature in the material, moral, and spiritual realms permits a state of existence which is higher and better than the given natural conditions, a state of harmonious balance of material and social values.
Along with the earnest, he argued, play is necessary to true culture.
Quotations: "The great instinctive forces of civilized life have their origin: law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primaeval soil of play."
In 1916 Johan Huizinga became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was also a member of the International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations in 1938.
In 1937 Huizinga married his second wife Auguste Schölvinck, 37 years his younger. Huizinga's son Leonhard Huizinga became a well-known writer in the Netherlands. His other son was Jacob Herman Huizinga who translated into English one of his father's works.