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“... 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. Huizinga (pronounced ‘Housing-ha’) was born in 1872, the ...”

“... It is an image that has inspired varied imaginative treatment down to our own times, in films like John Boorman’s vulgar and energetic epic Excalibur or Bresson’s stark, pessimistic Lancelot du Lac. It is rumoured that Jancso is now preparing a film, inspired by the work of Georges Duby, of the great clash of knights at Bouvines (1214), one of the few ...”

“... Henry IV of England is ‘impulsive, changeable, irascible … unwilling to listen to advice’. John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy is ‘graceless, awkward and taciturn’, ‘brutal, cunning and duplicitous’, while his son, Philip the Good, is a playboy prince, given to ‘dancing, feasting, jousting, hunting and fornication’. Philip is admitted to be ...”

“... good old Bob Boothby is in. Franz Rosenzweig is invisible, but there are four references to Lord John Russell. Forget Kafka, Freud, Durkheim, S.D. Luzzatto, Chagall, Sholom Aleichem and (aside from fleeting mentions) Mendele Moikher Seforim and J.L. Peretz. The last three were the most celebrated writers of the golden age of Yiddish literature: like all the ...”

“... comedie’. In similar fashion he began his earlier Discovery of the Fraudulent Practises of John Darrell (another exorcist, but a Protestant one this time) with the invocation: ‘open the curtaine, and see their Puppettes play.’ Harsnett’s point is that a ritual which seems to manifest supernatural power is no more than a play. Greenblatt’s ...”

“... to evoke, in unforgettable detail, a moment of seismic historical change. Like the German painter, John Hale has produced a vast and enthralling mosaic. In his new cultural history of Renaissance Europe a sprawling mass of individual scenes, deftly drawn and coloured, capture the pain and the beauty of massive social and cultural change. As with ...”

“... neatly divided by four traditional ‘quarter days’ – Annunciation (25 March), the Nativity of John the Baptist (24 June), Michaelmas (29 September) and Christmas – that were used as deadlines for instalments of rent and debt.The annual religious cycle melded with older traditions of seasonal celebration, and spurred new ones too. In England the calendar ...”

“... shows a mill being brought back into use under the eye of God the Father. Christ is emptying St John’s eagle out of a sack into a hopper to join St Matthew’s angel, St Mark’s lion, St Luke’s ox and St Paul with his sword. They are ground into the pure flour of hope, faith and love, scooped up and bagged by Erasmus the miller under the supervision of ...”

“... to prove this thoroughly anti-Modernist point. Our guide has studied his sources closely – Huizinga, Braudel, Giedion, Ariès. Praz – and he quibbles agreeably with these higher authorities as he shows us round selected buildings of the old world. First on the itinerary is a Medieval town house: a public place full of the ‘crush and hubbub of ...”

“... of experience, a sudden heightened apprehension of another more intense reality could also, as Huizinga had shown, be aroused in the eyes of the historian by simple everyday objects of the past. Ankersmit thought that an uncanny elision of the two registers of the sublime, the monumental and the microscopic, was underway in an invisible revolution. Out of ...”