The vanquished party, as likely as not innocent, was dragged half-dead to the gallows
Alexander Murray: Huizinga’s history of the Middle Ages, 19 March 1998
The Autumn of the Middle Ages
by John Huizinga, translated by Rodney Payton.
Chicago, 560 pp., £15.95, December 1997,0 226 35994 8 Show More
by John Huizinga, translated by Rodney Payton.
Chicago, 560 pp., £15.95, December 1997,
“... 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 ... ”
