Quote from Huizinga

"To the world when it was half a thousand years younger," Huizinga begins, "the outline of all things seemed more clearly marked than to us."

Life in the Middle Ages

Life seemed to consist in extremes - a fierce religious asceticism and an unrestrained licentiousness, ferocious judicial punishments and great popular waves of pity and mercy, the most horrible crimes and the most extravagant acts of saintliness - and everywhere a sea of tears, for men have never wept so unrestrainedly as in those centuries.

Publication and Significance

First published in 1924, 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.

Analysis of Medieval Culture

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.