Huizinga, Johan.  The Waning of the Middle Ages.  New York:  Anchor
Books (Doubleday).  1954.  Pp 362.  $8.95.

     Johan Huizinga is the heir apparent to Burckhardt in the field
of Late Medieval/Renaissance cultural history.  Burckhardt began
his Civilization in the Middle Ages to explain the origins of the
Italian renaissance, as Huizinga related the evolution and
convolution of the Medieval culture in Northern Europe to its later
form in the renaissance.  Where Burckhardt was careful to point out
the civil and individual predisposition of Italians to Renaissance
concepts, Huizinga noted that feudalistic inertia delayed the
development of the Renaissance France and Northern Europe.  In the
manner of philosophers, who must wrestle with Plato, Huizinga
constantly struggled with Burckhardt as he wrote  history.  
     The single reference to Burckhardt in Waning is suspicious
itself.  To mention the author of a seminal work in one's field,
near one's period and geographically close, fewer times than St.
Francis of Paula (who?) is a bit strange.  Huizinga took issue with
those who had in the past ignored the contributions of the lower
society (Burckhardt) and with those who exaggerate "the distance
separating Italy from the  Western countries and the Renaissance
from the Middle Ages" (Burckhardt again) without mentioning names.
     Even as Huizinga attempted to provide a different and expanded
point of view from Burckhardt's elitist, narrow worldview, a
dialectical system develops in which Huizinga's style represents at
times the Burckhardtian stance, his own self-conscious criticisms
of Burckhardt, and then a synthesis of the two.  When Huizinga
worried least worried about forging ahead into virgin historico-
cultural space he is at his best.  He would appear to have adopted
Burckhardt's methods of studying multitudinous original and
secondary sources, and anchoring his theory in anecdotal
information about historical personages.  Huizinga diverged in
giving almost as much attention to doggerel and mediocre prose as
he did to masterworks (another subtle rebellion against elitist
history) when he thought that it would help to explain popular
mentality.  Huizinga believed the psychic state of the common and
uneducated man is as formative as the "cult personalities" Dante
and Da Vinci, of whom Burckhardt was so proud.
     In the place of Burckhardt's random eruptions of moral
pronouncements Huizinga strayed into the still-young field of
psychology, or maybe his own brand of psycho-mysticism.  Either he
is terribly profound or confused.  "One of the fundamental traits
of the mind of the declining Middle Ages is the predominance of the
sense of sight, a predominance which is closely connected with the
atrophy of thought.  Thought takes the form of visual images
(284)." Sometimes he approaches the absolutism of Burckhardt's
pronouncements, as in this claim:  "A horror vacui reigns, always
a symptom of artistic decline (248)."   In other places this
moralism is tempered, strengthened by thought that is lucid, and
perhaps even original.  A Hegelian synthesis occurs;  Huizinga's
Burckhardt-style moralizing mixes with his tendency to toy with
abstractions.  This from page 112:  
          "Erotic thought never acquires literary value
          save by some process of transfiguration of
          complex and painful reality into illusionary
          forms . . . It is once more the aspiration
          towards the life sublime, but this time viewed
          from the animal side.  It is an ideal all the
          same, even though it be that of unchastity."
This was a timely observation in 1924.  Britain and America were
struggling with concepts of obscenity and its function in free
speech.  Huizinga may not have given us Truth, but his perceptive
offerings have left another tool, another measure for our mental
toolbox.
Jason Carr 
http://www.mousetrap.net/~mouse/uta/