Rereading Huizinga: Autumn of the Middle Ages, a Century Later

Rereading Huizinga: Autumn of the Middle Ages, a Century Later explores the legacy and historiographical impact of Johan Huizinga’s 1919 masterwork a century after its publication. Often considered one of the most successful books in medieval European history, its reception has varied over the last hundred years, popular with non-academic readers, and appraised more critically by fellow historians and those more generally in the field of medieval studies. There is broad consensus, however, about the work’s absolute centrality, and the authors of this volume assess the Autumn of the Middle Ages reception, afterlife, and continued vitality.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction: Peter Arnade and Martha Howell I: Huizinga and the Late-Medieval North 1. Andrew Brown: Huizinga's Autumn: The Burgundian Court at Play. 2. Walter Simons: Wrestling with the Angel: Huizinga, Herfsttij, and Religion. 3. Jan Dumolyn and Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin: Huizinga's Silence: Urban Culture and Herfsttij. 4. Jun Cho: The Forms behind the Vormen: Huizinga, New Cultural History, and the Culture of Commerce. 5. Marc Boone: Yet Another Failed State? The Huizinga-Pirenne Controversy on the Burgundian State Reconsidered. II: Art, Literature and Sources in Autumn of the Middle Ages 6. Diane Wolfthal: Art History and Huizinga's Autumn. 7. Larry Silver: Did Germany Have a Medieval Herbstzeit? 8. Graeme Small: The Making of the Autumn of the Middle Ages I: Narrative Sources and Their Treatment in Autumn. 9. Anton van der Lem: The Making of the Autumn of the Middle Ages II: The Eagle and His Pigeonholes: How Huizinga Organized His Sources. III: Legacies: Huizinga and Historiography 10. Carol Symes: Harvest of Death: Johan Huizinga's Critique of Medievalism. 11. Birger Vanwesenbeeck: Huizinga, Theorist of Lateness? 12. Peter Arnade: Huizinga: Anthropologist Avant la Lettre? 13. Myriam Greilsammer: A Late and Ambivalent Recognition: (The Autumn of) Johan Huizinga and the French Historians of the Nouvelle Histoire. Epilogue: Willem Otterspeer: Reading Together Bibliography of works cited Index of names

About the Author :
Peter Arnade is dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Hawai'i Manoa. Among his publications are Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late-Medieval Ghent and Beggars, Iconoclasts and Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt. Martha Howell is Miriam Champion Professor of History at Columbia University, New York. Among her publications are Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600; The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300-1550; and Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities. Anton van der Lem is curator of rare books at University Library Leiden. He made the inventory of the Huizinga Archives. In 2018 he edited the centennial edition of Herfsttij, richly illustrated with 300 reproductions.

Review :
"Rereading Huizinga offers the reader much more than an analysis of the reasons why Autumn is considered to be one of the masterpieces of Western medieval scholarship or why it was ahead of its time. [...] Historians of various stripes will find much of use and interest in this rich volume." - Koen B. Tanghe, Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies 41.1 (2021) "These are two very enlightening collections of essays that deliver state of the art observations not only on Autumn but also more generally on Burgundian studies. The volumes are very useful companions for students, which will help them to read Huizinga with an informed view of important scholarly trends and research results in their field of study. They will also appeal to researchers, who will find in them a nuanced and fair assessment of the legacy, or rather, the multiple legacies, left by this work since its first publication." - Katell Lavéant, Utrecht University, joint review in BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review, Volume 136 (2021) "Rereading Huizinga allows readers to examine once more Huizinga’s text, taking a fresh look at Autumn’s contributions to the fields of history, art, and literature. [...] This volume is an important reconsideration of a key publication on late medieval history, of interest to scholars in a variety of disciplines as well as time periods." - Elizabeth Rice Mattison, EuropeNow Journal, July 2021 "[The] temptation [to taste the forbidden fruit of Herfsttij] is unlikely to be resisted by readers of Re-reading Huizinga: Autumn of the Middle Ages a Century Later. The fruit is tasted, criticised—sometimes strenuously—and appraised in this wide-ranging re-appraisal of Herfsttij and its author. This collection of important essays originated in an international conference held in New York in November 1996, the year in which the new English translation of Herfsttij by Payton and Mammitzsch appeared. An Introduction by two of the editors, Peter Arnade and Martha Howell, outlines a major purpose of the volume: to try to explain how and why Herfsttij ‘remains one of the masterpieces of Western historical scholarship’." - Malcolm Vale, St John’s College, Oxford, UK, English Historical Review, July 2021