The vanquished party, as likely as not innocent, was dragged half-dead to the gallows

Alexander Murray

  • The Autumn of the Middle Ages by John Huizinga, translated by Rodney Payton
    Chicago, 560 pp, £15.95, December 1997, ISBN 0 226 35994 8

‘Positively medieval,’ we say, implying a scheme of historical periods which underlies most of what we think and do. The Middle Ages, to 1485, were barbarous and, luckily for them, also an ‘age of faith’; then came the Renaissance with its humane values and realism, a recognisable ancestor to the modern world. The job of testing the assumptions behind this distinction is never-ending, and we must be grateful to scholars who have done it well. Two names spring at once to mind: those of Jacob Burckhardt, whose Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, written in 1860, is still required reading on its subject; and Johan Huizinga, who wrote in Burckhardt’s shadow about the same centuries (though not the same area), and in 1919 achieved the same with The Autumn of the Middle Ages.

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