Pelican Series: The Waning Of The Middle Ages

More about the book

Huizinga's study of the forms life, thought and art in France and the Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has, for over fifty years, steadily maintained its reputation as a historical classic. Starting from an attempt to understand fully the art of the brothers van Eyck, Johan Huizinga rid himself of the prevailing notion that the Middle Ages had been little more than a prelude to the Renaissance. In this splendid review of the whole culture of the period, therefore, he presents the doings of people, princes and statesmen, the chivalry of knights, and the thoughts of theologians, artists, poets and chroniclers as the final and perfect flowering of an older style of life. If the seeds of humanism were forming, they contributed little to the magnificence of the display.