The Autumn of the Middle Ages

By Johan Huizinga

"Here is the first full translation into English of one of the 20th century's few undoubted classics of history." —Washington Post Book World

The Autumn of the Middle Ages is Johan Huizinga's classic portrait of life, thought, and art in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France and the Netherlands. Few who have read this book in English realize that The Waning of the Middle Ages, the only previous translation, is vastly different from the original Dutch, and incompatible will all other European-language translations.

For Huizinga, the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century marked not the birth of a dramatically new era in history—the Renaissance—but the fullest, ripest phase of medieval life and thought. However, his work was criticized both at home and in Europe for being "old-fashioned" and "too literary" when The Waning of the Middle Ages was first published in 1919. In the 1924 translation, Fritz Hopman adapted, reduced and altered the Dutch edition—softening Huizinga's passionate arguments, dulling his nuances, and eliminating theoretical passages. He dropped many passages Huizinga had quoted in their original old French. Additionally, chapters were rearranged, all references were dropped, and mistranslations were introduced.

This translation corrects such errors, recreating the second Dutch edition which represents Huizinga's thinking at its most important stage. Everything that was dropped or rearranged has been restored. Prose quotations appear in French, with translations preprinted at the bottom of the page, mistranslations have been corrected.

"The advantages of the new translation are so many. . . . It is one of the greatest, as well as one of the most enthralling, historical classics of the twentieth century, and everyone will surely want to read it in the form that was obviously intended by the author." —Francis Haskell, New York Review of Books

"A once pathbreaking piece of historical interpretation. . . . This new translation will no doubt bring Huizinga and his pioneering work back into the discussion of historical interpretation." —Rosamond McKitterick, New York Times Book Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Apr 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9780226767680

Book preview

JOHAN HUIZINGA, born in 1872, became professor of history at the University of Leiden in 1915 and taught there until 1942, when the Nazis closed the university and held him hostage until shortly before his death in 1945. His other books include Erasmus and the Age of Reformation, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, and Men and Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance.

RODNEY PAYTON is professor of Liberal Studies at Western Washington University. He is the author of A Modern Reader’s Guide to Dante’s Inferno. ULRICH MAMMITZSCH (d. 1990) was professor of Liberal Studies at Western Washington University. He is the author of Evolution of the Garbhadhatu Mandala and the translator of Dietrich Seckel’s The Buddhist Art of East Asia.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

© 1996 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 1996

Paperback edition 1996.

Printed in the United States of America

11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 0 3 02       3 4 5 6 7

ISBN 0-226-35992-1 (cloth)

ISBN: 0-226-35994-8

ISBN 978-0-226-76768-0 (ebook)

This translation is based on the 1921 edition of Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Huizinga, Johan, 1872–1945.

[Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen. English]

The autumn of the Middle Ages /Johan Huizinga ; translated by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch.

p.       cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. France—Civilization—1328–1600. 2. Netherlands—Civilization. 3. Civilization, Medieval. I. Title.

DC33.2.H83   1996

944’025—dc20

95-613

CIP

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

JOHAN HUIZINGA

THE AUTUMN OF THE MIDDLE AGES

Translated by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

PIÆ VXORIS ANIMÆ

M. V. H. - S.

CONTENTS

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

PREFACE TO THE DUTCH EDITION

PREFACE TO THE GERMAN TRANSLATION

Chapter One: THE PASSIONATE INTENSITY OF LIFE

Chapter Two: THE CRAVING FOR A MORE BEAUTIFUL LIFE

Chapter Three: THE HEROIC DREAM

Chapter Four: THE FORMS OF LOVE

Chapter Five: THE VISION OF DEATH

Chapter Six: THE DEPICTION OF THE SACRED

Chapter Seven: THE PIOUS PERSONALITY

Chapter Eight: RELIGIOUS EXCITATION AND RELIGIOUS FANTASY

Chapter Nine: THE DECLINE OF SYMBOLISM

Chapter Ten: THE FAILURE OF IMAGINATION

Chapter Eleven: THE FORMS OF THOUGHT IN PRACTICE

Chapter Twelve: ART IN LIFE

Chapter Thirteen: IMAGE AND WORD

Chapter Fourteen: THE COMING OF THE NEW FORM

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

THE IDEA OF THIS TRANSLATION HAD ITS MOMENT of conception in Karl J. Weintraub’s class in History of Culture at the University of Chicago (now more than twenty years ago) when Weintraub commented, with some heat, on the deficiencies of the English translation of Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen that we students were using when it was compared to the elegance of the Dutch edition he had on the lectern. The tiny margins of my crumbling paperback are filled with all my efforts to get down the corrections. When I began my own teaching of Huizinga’s text, which I had come to treasure, those illegible notes suggested that what I was professing fell far short and an examination of the original showed me that Weintraub’s observations were justified. Yet, in spite of the shortcomings of the translation, my students always responded well to Huizinga. Later Professor Weintraub commented to me that it was an indication of the power of its subject and style that Huizinga’s book commonly captivated readers in spite of the very inferior, crippled version¹ in which it appeared in English.

Therefore when my colleague Ulrich Mammitzsch, now deceased, and I agreed to attempt a new translation there was a certain feeling of being the rescuers of something fine that had been corrupted and undervalued. However, this feeling was somewhat challenged by the fact that Huizinga not only authorized the English translation, but also apparently collaborated with Fritz Hopman in producing it as a variant version of the book. He specifically approved the results in the preface he wrote for the translation.

This English edition is not a simple translation of the original Dutch (second edition 1921, first 1919), but the result of a work of adaptation, reduction and consolidation under the author’s direction. The references, here left out, may be found in full in the original. . . .

The author wishes to express his sincere thanks to . . . Mr. F. Hopman, of Leiden, whose clear insight into the exigencies of translation rendered the recasting possible, and whose endless patience with the wishes of an exacting author made the difficult task a work of friendly cooperation.²

Even given this endorsement by the author, I think that any studious reader of both the Dutch (or the very accurate German translation) and the English would conclude that the original is a much better book. The original is nearly one-third longer and has many more citations of original material. In the Hopman translation, blocks of text are inexplicably moved around, and sometimes Hopman’s usually good English fails him as when he translates mystiek en détail as mysticism by retail. It seems that Huizinga ultimately must have thought the original better, as none of the adaptation, reduction and consolidation found its way into subsequent Dutch printings or foreign translations of the book with the exception of the revised arrangement of chapters.

The route by which Huizinga arrived at the Hopman translation can be traced in the Briefwisseling (Correspondence), if not, entirely, his motivation for taking it.³ Huizinga had begun negotiations with the French publisher Edouard Champion of Paris, who preferred a shortened version of the book and without the references. This project fell through, owing to disagreements over the rights of publication of the French edition in Holland in 1923 (letter 457), and Huizinga was left with the condensed, but unpublished, French manuscript. (An accurate French edition was eventually published by the firm of Payot in 1932, in a translation by Julia Bastin [letter 559].) In 1923, Huizinga was also negotiating with Edward Arnold and Company about an English edition, and, owing to the fact that Arnold had no one in their office who could read Dutch, they reviewed it in the condensed French version. Sir Rennell Rodd, a diplomat, poet, and historian, and Arnold’s reviewer, thought the original form of the book would sell only to scholars and preferred it in its French form, which he thought might have a popular audience (letter 462) and, although Huizinga protested, he did not do so very strongly (letter 466). An abridgment on the lines of the French manuscript was ultimately ageed upon (letters 472 and 477) and the Hopman version, called The Waning of the Middle Ages, is the result.

All this was taking place while the final arrangements for the German edition were being set. The German edition is precise in all particulars, but the fourteen original Dutch chapters are broken up into twenty-three, which are more even in length. This was Huizinga’s own idea, evidently incorporated in the unpublished French translation and eventually carried forward in the English as well (letter 470).

Thus Huizinga clearly preferred a complete translation of Herfsttij, although he did think the chapter divisions could be improved. His quarrel with Champion over distribution rights, however, suggests that remuneration was an important issue, as he raised practically no objections to the condensation ultimately produced by Hopman for Arnold and Company. It is possible, too, given that the prospect of a wide market for the book might have had something to do with his thinking, that in obtaining an English edition Huizinga was also looking forward to the American market. Huizinga wrote two books about America, both gently critical.⁴ Like his contemporary Freud, Huizinga thought American life suffered from its lack of social forms; he considered Americans to be materialistic and far, far too hasty in the pursuit of their affairs. He invented a motto for America, This Here, and Soon, to characterize this haste, which, he thought, all too often, led to superficiality. Perhaps this perception caused him to believe that a simplified and less allusive Autumn might succeed best in the American market. The fourteen uneven Dutch chapters became the twenty-three short chapters as in the German edition, much more suitable for daily classroom assignments and for a people with a short attention span. The work of preparing the English translation was given to Fritz Hopman, a student of English literature and journalist, who at one time was chairman of the Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde (Dutch Literature Society). He was in financial difficulties in 1924, and Huizinga was probably glad to be able to provide him with work.⁵

F. W. N. Hugenholtz’s study of the history of the text, The Fame of a Masterwork,⁶ shows that the first recognition of the book’s importance came, not from Huizinga’s Dutch colleagues, but in German reviews. The Dutch were inclined to consider The Autumn of the Middle Ages⁷ far too literary for serious history and mistakenly thought its approach to be old-fashioned rather than realizing that it was truly a revolutionary innovation. Autumn was Huizinga’s first major work published after he became professor of history at Leiden, and Leiden was not at that time Holland’s first university, nor was Huizinga the most famous professor of history. Defensive, in the face of native criticism of the work he might, indeed, have considered the English translation a step to a further revision (the second Dutch edition had appeared in 1921, the Hopman translation came out in 1924). It seems to me, that much of what is left out of the Hopman version are elements which contribute to the literary, that is to say aesthetic character of the book and this might be a direct response to his Dutch critics.

There is another possible reason for the truncated English version. Probably anyone who reads Autumn will notice that it reveals a great deal of the private side of Huizinga himself. In it, the reader sees not only Huizinga’s opinions and strong convictions, but glimpses his passions and, I think, his spiritual side as well. Perhaps he realized this and the drawing back so apparent in the original English is an instinctive reaction that he also exhibited in other circumstances.

In his brief autobiography written at the very end of his life⁸ Huizinga reveals that he consistently hid his true self even from his colleagues and students. It is not false modesty when I say that, though I have been known as an early riser since childhood, I never rose quite as early as people believed. The relationship of his work to his private self was frequently misjudged by others. Huizinga almost seems pleased at their confusion.

Regarding my biography of Erasmus, many people have expressed the view that here was a man after my own heart. As far as I can tell, nothing could be farther from the truth for, much though I admire Erasmus, he inspires me with little sympathy and, as soon as the work was done, I did my best to put him out of my mind. I remember a conversation in January 1932 with a German colleague who contended that Erasmus was much more my line of country than the Waning of the Middle Ages with which, he claimed, I must have struggled manfully. I thought about the matter for a moment and then I had to smile. In fact, my historical and literary studies never struck me as partaking of the nature of struggle in any way, nor any of my work as a great challenge. Indeed, the whole idea of having to overcome enormous obstacles was as alien to me as having to compete in a race, as alien as the spirit of competition whose importance in cultural life I myself have emphasized in my Homo Ludens.

When he finds himself on the edge of a deep personal revelation, Huizinga goes so far, and no further.

. . . In September 1899, I was granted two weeks’ extra leave, immediately after beginning of term, to attend the Congress of Orientalists in Rome. I went there with J. P. Vogel, who intended to go on to India, and with André Jolles with whom I had started a close friendship in the autumn of 1896. This friendship was to play a large part in my life for more than 35 years, until 9th October 1933 when it was abruptly cut short—and not by me. I could write a whole book on my relation with Jolles, so full is my mind of him and despite all that has happened—my heart as well.

Huizinga’s later works do not reveal the personality of the author as much as Autumn does. A prominent sense of the author only again becomes apparent in his great moral essay of the thirties, In the Shadow of Tomorrow.⁹

Given Huizinga’s importance to historiography, the fact that the English translation is a variant text has not been given enough attention. With the single exception of Weintraub, no one, to my knowledge, has pointed out the critical importance of that fact, even though the introduction might have served as a warning to a professionally critical discipline. Is it possible that English-speaking historians have been discussing this book with their foreign colleagues without realizing that they were reading a significantly different text? If this is so, it is a primary justification for the present translation.

Hopman’s work does have the virtue of being graceful. He did have an excellent grasp of English vocabulary, and his rendition is sometimes lovely, but it is not literal and sometimes something more than a literal quality is missing. It is not proper for a translator in the second place to judge too harshly the work of a predecessor, but a reader deserves some indication why one translation should be preferred over another. The most glaring changes in the Hopman from the Dutch second edition are the many omissions of examples drawn from the (in most instances) medieval French sources that Huizinga cites in the original language (although there are a few instances where Hopman includes examples not in the Dutch edition). The present translators felt that the original divisions of the text much more clearly reflected the organization of Huizinga’s argument in spite of their rather uneven lengths and Huizinga’s second thoughts about the matter. Finally, the Hopman translation omits, as its introduction points out, the documentation. These alterations are restored in this translation.

Much more serious issues are those alterations by Hopman that tend to distort Huizinga’s meaning. Hopman is sometimes prone to pull Huizinga’s punches. For instance, one of the most significant elements in Autumn is its assertions about the proper use of sources, an issue addressed several times. Here is a representative passage in this translation:

Daily life offered unlimited range for acts of flaming passion and childish imagination. Our medieval historians who prefer to rely as much as possible on official documents because the chronicles are unreliable fall thereby victim to an occasionally dangerous error. The documents tell us little about the difference in tone that separates us from those times; they let us forget the fervent pathos of medieval life. Of all the passions permeating medieval life with their color, only two are mentioned, as a rule by legal documents: greed and quarrelsomeness. Who has not frequently wondered about the nearly incredible violence and stubbornness with which greed, pugnacity, or vindictiveness rise to prominence in the court documents of that period! It is only in the general context of the passions which inflame every sphere of life that these tensions become acceptable and intelligible to us. This is why the authors of the chronicles, no matter how superficial they may be with respect to the actual facts and no matter how often they may err in reporting them, are indispensable if we want to understand that age correctly.

And here is the same passage in Hopman:

A scientific historian of the Middle Ages, relying first and foremost on official documents, which rarely refer to the passions, except violence and cupidity, occasionally runs the risk of neglecting the difference of tone between the life of the expiring Middle Ages and that of our own days. Such documents would sometimes make us forget the vehement pathos of medieval life, of which the chroniclers, however defective as to material facts, always keep us in mind.

Not only has Hopman made a strong statement weak, his version misses the nuance of just how passionate Huizinga was about the passions of the Middle Ages.

Similar distortions frequently occur. Here is Hopman’s translation of a passage about the profane interest in such things as Mary’s marital relationship with Joseph:

This familiarity with sacred things is, on the one hand, a sign of deep and ingenuous faith; on the other, it entails irreverence whenever mental contact with the infinite fails. Curiosity, ingenuous though it be, leads to profanation.

Here is this translation:

This fatuous familiarity with God in daily life has to be seen in two ways. On the one hand it testifies to the absolute stability and immediacy of faith, but where this familiarity becomes habitual, it increases the danger that the godless (who are always with us), but also the pious, in moments of insufficient religious tension, continuously profane faith more or less consciously and intentionally.

For the student interested in historiography itself, perhaps the omissions of theoretical statements are the most serious. In the famous discussion of the three routes to the beautiful life in the second chapter, Hopman omits this statement of serious interest to anyone concerned with Huizinga’s definitions of culture and civilization and with the movement of his thinking towards the theoretical statement of Homo Ludens,¹⁰ which defines the role of play in culture.

The great divide in the perception of the beauty of life comes much more between the Renaissance and the Modern Period than between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The turnabout occurs at the point where art and life begin to diverge. It is the point where art begins to be no longer in the midst of life, as a noble part of the joy of life itself, but outside of life as something to be highly venerated, as something to turn to in moments of edification or rest. The old dualism separating God and world has thus returned in another form, that of the separation of art and life. Now a line has been drawn right through the enjoyments offered by life. Henceforth they are separated into two halves—one lower, one higher. For medieval man they were all sinful without exception; now they are all considered permissible, but their ethical evaluation differs according to their greater or lesser degree of spirituality.

The things which can make life enjoyable remain the same. They are, now as before, reading, music, fine arts, travel, the enjoyment of nature, sports, fashion, social vanity (knightly orders, honorary offices, gatherings) and the intoxication of the senses. For the majority, the border between the higher and lower levels seems now to be located between the enjoyment of nature and sports. But this border is not firm. Most likely sport will sooner or later again be counted among the higher enjoyments—at least insofar as it is the art of physical strength and courage. For medieval man the border lay, in the best of cases, right after reading; the enjoyment of reading could only be sanctified through striving for virtue or wisdom. For music and the fine arts, it was their service to faith alone which was recognized as being good. Enjoyment per se was sinful. The Renaissance had managed to free itself from the rejection of all the joy of life as something sinful, but had not yet found a new way of separating the higher and lower enjoyments of life; the Renaissance wanted an unencumbered enjoyment of all of life. The new distinction is the result of the compromise between the Renaissance and Puritanism that is at the base of modern spiritual attitudes. It amounted to a mutual capitulation in which the one side insisted on saving beauty while the other insisted on the condemnation of sin. Strict Puritanism, just as did the Middle Ages, still condemned as basically sinful and worldly the entire sphere of the beautification of life with an exception being made in cases where such efforts assumed expressly religious forms and sanctified themselves through their use in the service of faith. Only after the Puritan worldview lost its intensity did the Renaissance receptiveness to all the joys of life gain ground again; perhaps even more ground than before because, beginning with the eighteenth century there is a tendency to regard the natural per se an element of the ethically good. Anyone attempting to draw the dividing line between the higher and lower enjoyment of life according to the dictates of ethical consciousness would no longer separate art from sensuous enjoyment, the enjoyment of nature from the cult of the body, the elevated from the natural, but would only separate egotism, lies, and vanity from purity.

There are many such issues to which we could point, not in the spirit of demeaning a translation that has served Huizinga well, but in the sense that having done its work and brought the importance of the mind of Huizinga to the attention of the English-speaking world, it is now obsolete and a more critical and deeper look at Huizinga requires access to a version of the work closer to that known by the rest of the world.

This translation was made from the second Dutch edition of 1921. Seen from the vantage point of the second edition, the first has a tentative character that Huizinga eliminated in his revision. Huizinga made further minor revisions in later editions, but the second represents his thinking at its most seminal stage. We compared our work carefully with the German translation of 1924, which, Huizinga notes, follows the second Dutch edition exactly. We have included not only the preface to the Dutch edition, but also the preface that Huizinga wrote for the German translation, for the insight it gives into the title and its comment on the question of translation itself. We have restored the documentation and added a few translators’ notes to clarify Huizinga’s references to things that might be common knowledge or self-evident to a Dutch reader but not necessarily so to others. This version also includes translations of the citations that Huizinga makes in the original languages. Such translations have become customary in later editions, although they do not appear in the Dutch original we followed. Our translations follow Hopman, but we have made several alterations according to our own judgment.

*   *   *

Ulrich Mammitzsch, my colleague and co-translator, was a noted specialist in Buddhist art and literature, but his formidable erudition extended to great works of all cultures and he was as pleased to discuss Schiller as he was his beloved mandalas. He felt a special affinity for Huizinga, who began his academic life as a student of Eastern culture, and who had a love of literature much like Ulrich’s. Mostly, however, Ulrich’s dedication to Huizinga was because they were alike in their high-mindedness. As Ulrich Mammitzsch fled the East Zone, not because of political theory, but because he found the Communists to be unethical, so Johan Huizinga was brought to denounce the Nazis from the first principles of civilized behavior. The two minds spoke to one another directly and I will never forget Ulrich’s excitement as we read Huizinga’s description of the tension in the life of medieval common people, strung between the church and the nobility—a tension which, Ulrich exclaimed, he had seen the last of as a child in rural Germany before the war. He read the book from the inside, so to speak, and I would like to attribute whatever virtues this translation has to his insightful sensitivity.

RODNEY J. PAYTON

PREFACE TO THE FIRST AND SECOND DUTCH EDITIONS

IN MOST INSTANCES IT IS THE ORIGIN OF THE NEW that attracts the attention of the mind to the past. We want to know how the new ideas and the forms of life that shine in their fullness during later times came to be. We view past ages primarily in terms of the promise they hold for those that follow. How eagerly the Middle Ages have been scrutinized for evidence of the first sprouts of modern culture, so eagerly that it sometimes must appear as if the intellectual history of the Middle Ages was nothing but the advent of the Renaissance. Did we not see everywhere in this age, which was once regarded as rigid and dead, new growths that all seemed to point to future perfection? Yet in our search for newly arising life it is easily forgotten that in history, as in nature, the processes of death and birth are eternally in step with one another. Old forms of thought die out while, at the same time and on the same soil, a new crop begins to bloom.

This book is an attempt to view the time around the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, not as announcing the Renaissance, but as the end of the Middle Ages, as the age of medieval thought in its last phase of life, as a tree with overripe fruits, fully unfolded and developed. The luxuriant growth of old compelling forms over the living core of thought, the drying and rigidifying of a previously valid store of thought: this is the main content of the following pages. In writing this text, my eye was trained on the depth of the evening sky, a sky steeped blood red, desolate with threatening leaden clouds, full of the false glow of copper. Looking back at what I have written, the question arises whether, if my eye had dwelt still longer on the evening sky, the turbid colors may yet have dissolved into utter clarity. It also seems quite possible that the image, now that I have given it contours and colors, may yet have become more gloomy and less serene than I had perceived it when I started my labors. It can easily happen to one who has his vision trained downward that what he perceives becomes too decrepit and wilted, that too much of the shadow of death has been allowed to fall upon his work.

The point of departure for this work was the attempt to better understand the work of the van Eycks and that of their successors and to understand it within the context of the entire life of that age. The Burgundian community was the frame of reference that I had in mind: it seemed possible to view this community as a civilization in its own right, just like the Italian community of the fourteenth century; the title of the work was first set as The Century of Burgundy. But as the scope of this civilization was viewed in a wider perspective, certain limitations had to be abandoned. Just to retain the notion of a postulated unity of Burgundian culture meant that non-Burgundian France had to be given at least as much attention. Thus the place of Burgundy was taken by the dual entities of France and the Netherlands and that in a very different way. While in viewing the dying medieval culture the Dutch element lags behind the French, there are areas where that element has its own significance: in the life of piety and that of art. These are given the opportunity to speak in greater detail.

There is no need to defend the crossing of the fixed geographic boundaries in the tenth chapter so as to call on, next to Ruusbroec and Denis the Carthusian, on Eckhardt, Suso, and Tauler as witnesses. How little my story is justified by the writings I have studied from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries compared to all those I wanted to read. How much I would have liked to place, next to the evolution of the main types of the different intellectual traditions on which some of the notions of these figures are often based, yet still others. But if I relied among the historiographers on Froissart and Chastellain more than on others, among the poets on Eustache Deschamps, among the theologians on Jean de Gerson and Denis the Carthusian, among the painters on Jan van Eyck—so is this not only the result of the limitation of my material, but even more so the result of the richness of their works and the singularly keen way in which their expressions are the preeminent mirror of the spirit of their age.

It is the forms of life and thought that are used as evidence here. To capture the essential content that rests in the form: is this not the proper task of historical study?

PREFACE TO THE GERMAN TRANSLATION

THE NEED TO BETTER UNDERSTAND THE ART OF THE van Eyck brothers and that of their successors and to view these artists in the context of the life of their time provided the first impetus for this book. But a different, in many respects more comprehensive image emerged during the course of the investigation. It became evident that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in France and in the Netherlands in particular are much more suited to give us a sense of the end of the Middle Ages and of the last manifestation of medieval culture than they are to demonstrate to us the awakening Renaissance.

Our minds prefer to concern themselves with origins and beginnings. In most instances the promise that ties one age to its successor appears to be more important than the memories that link it to its predecessor. As a result, the search to find the first sprouts of modern culture in medieval culture was carried out so eagerly and to the point that the term medieval period itself came to be questioned and it appeared as if this epoch was barely something other than the age that ushered in the Renaissance. But dying and becoming keep just as much pace with each other in history as in nature. To trace the vanishing of overripe cultural forms is not less significant—and by no means less fascinating—than to trace the arising of new forms. We do more justice, not only to artists like the van Eycks, but also to [poets such as] Eustache Deschamps, historiographers such as Froissart and Chastellain, theologians such as Jean de Gerson and Denis the Carthusian, and to all representatives of the spirit of this age if we view them not as initiating and heralding what is to come, but rather as completing the forms of an age in its final stage.

The author was, at the time he wrote this book, less aware than now of the danger of comparing historical periods to the seasons of the year; he asks therefore that the title of the book be taken only as a figure of speech that is intended to capture the general mood of the whole.

The translation follows exactly the second revised Dutch edition of 1921 (the first appeared in 1919). If the German tongue still tastes in places the flavor of the Dutch original, we should remind ourselves that a translation in the strict sense of the word is an impossibility even in so closely related languages such as German and Dutch. Why should we be so eager to obliterate fearfully the traces of what is foreign in that which is of foreign origin?

Many have supported this work of translation in a valuable way. We owe a debt of gratitude, next to the translator, primarily to our friends Prof. André Jolles (Leipzig), Prof. W. Vogelsang (Utrecht), and Paul Lehman (Munich). My sincere expression of thanks for his valuable contribution to this work go to Prof. Eugene Lerch, who took it upon himself to translate the French quotations found in the appended section.

Leiden

November 1923

Chapter One

THE PASSIONATE INTENSITY OF LIFE

¹

WHEN THE WORLD WAS HALF A THOUSAND YEARS younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness that joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child. Every event, every deed was defined in given and expressive forms and was in accord with the solemnity of a tight, invariable life style. The great events of human life—birth, marriage, death—by virtue of the sacraments, basked in the radiance of the divine mystery. But even the lesser events—a journey, labor, a visit—were accompanied by a multitude of blessings, ceremonies, sayings, and conventions.

There was less relief available for misfortune and for sickness; they came in a more fearful and more painful way. Sickness contrasted more strongly with health. The cutting cold and the dreaded darkness of winter were more concrete evils. Honor and wealth were enjoyed more fervently and greedily because they contrasted still more than now with lamentable poverty. A fur-lined robe of office, a bright fire in the oven, drink and jest, and a soft bed still possessed that high value for enjoyment that perhaps the English novel, in describing the joy of life, has affirmed over the longest period of time. In short, all things in life had about them something glitteringly and cruelly public. The lepers, shaking their rattles and holding processions, put their deformities openly on display. Every estate, order, and craft could be recognized by its dress. The notables, never appearing without the ostentatious display of their weapons and liveried servants, inspired awe and envy. The administration of justice, the sales of goods, weddings and funerals—all announced themselves through processions, shouts, lamentations and music. The lover carried the emblem of his lady, the member the insignia of his fraternity, the party the colors and coat of arms of its lord.

In their external appearance, too, town and countryside displayed the same contrast and color. The city did not dissipate, as do our cities, into carelessly fashioned, ugly factories and monotonous country homes, but, enclosed by its walls, presented a completely rounded picture that included its innumerable protruding towers. No matter how high and weighty the stone houses of the noblemen or merchants may have been, churches with their proudly rising masses of stone, dominated the city silhouettes.

Just as the contrast between summer and winter was stronger then than in our present lives, so was the difference between light and dark, quiet and noise. The modern city hardly knows pure darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.

From the continuing contrast, from the colorful forms with which every phenomenon forced itself on the mind, daily life received the kind of impulses and passionate suggestions that is revealed in the vacillating moods of unrefined exuberance, sudden cruelty, and tender emotions between which the life of the medieval city was suspended.

But one sound always rose above the clamor of busy life and, no matter how much of a tintinnabulation, was never confused with other noises, and, for a moment, lifted everything into an ordered sphere: that of the bells. The bells acted in daily life like concerned good spirits who, with their familiar voices, proclaimed sadness or joy, calm or unrest, assembly or exhortation. People knew them by familiar names: Fat Jacqueline, Bell Roelant; everyone knew their individual tones and instantly recognized their meaning. People never became indifferent to these sounds, no matter how overused they were. During the notorious duel between two burghers of Valenciennes in 1455 that kept the city and the entire court of Burgundy in extraordinary suspense, the great bell sounded as long as the fight lasted, laquelle fait hideux a oyr*¹¹ says Chastellain,² Sonner l’effroy, faire l’effroy was what the ringing of the alarm bell was called.³ How deafening the sound must have been when the bells of all the churches and cloisters of Paris pealed all day, or even all night, because a pope had been elected who was to end the schism or because peace had been arranged between Burgundy and Armagnac.⁴

Processions must have also been deeply moving. During sad times—and these came often—they could occasionally take place day after day even for weeks on end. In 1412, when the fatal conflict between the houses of Orléans and Burgundy had finally led to open civil war, King Charles VI seized the oriflamme so that he and John the Fearless could fight against the Armagnacs, who, by virtue of their alliance with England, had become traitors to their country. Daily processions were ordered to be held in Paris as long as the king was on foreign soil. They continued from the end of May into July and involved ever different groups, orders or guilds, ever different routes and ever different relics: les plus piteuses processions qui oncques eussent été veues de aage de homme.*² All were barefoot with empty stomachs, members of parliament and poor burghers alike; every one who was able carried a candle or a torch. There were always many small children with them. Even the poor country folk from the villages around Paris came running on bare feet. Processions were joined or watched, en grant pleur, en grant lermes, en grant devocion.†³ And heavy rain fell almost constantly during the entire period.⁵

Then there were the princely entry processions prepared with all the varied formal skills at the disposal of the main actors. And, with uninterrupted frequency, there were executions. The gruesome fascination and coarse compassion stirred at the place of execution became an important element in the spiritual nourishment of the people. For dealing with vicious robbers and murderers the courts invented terrible punishments: in Brussels a young arsonist and murderer was tied with a chain so that he could move in a circle about a stake surrounded by burning bundles of fagots. He introduced himself to the people in moving words as a warning example: et tellement fit attendrir les coeurs que tout le monde fondoit en larmes de compassion. Et fut sa fin reccommandée la plus belle que l’on avait oncques vue.⁶‡⁴ During the Burgundian reign of terror in Paris, Messire Nansart du Bois, an Armagnac, was beheaded. Not only did he grant forgiveness to the executioner, who, as was customary, requested it, but he even asked to be kissed by him. Foison de peuple y avoit, qui quasi tous ploroient à chaudes larmes.⁷*⁵ Frequently the sacrificial victims were great lords; in those cases the people had the even greater satisfaction of witnessing stern justice and a more forceful warning about the insecurity of high position than would be conveyed by a painting or a danse macabre.⁸ The authorities took pains that nothing was lacking in the impression the spectacle made. The nobles took their last walk bedecked in the symbols of their greatness. Jean de Montaigu, grand maitre d’hotel of the king and a victim of the hatred of John the Fearless, travels to the gallows seated high on top of a cart. Two trumpeters precede him. He is dressed in his robes of state, cap, vest, and pants—half white, half red—with golden spurs on his feet. The beheaded body was left hanging on the gallows still wearing those golden spurs. The wealthy canon Nicholas d’Orgemont—who fell victim to the vendetta of the Armagnacs in 1416—was carried through Paris on a garbage cart, clad in a wide purple cloak and cap of the same color to witness the execution of two of his comrades before he was led away to lifelong captivity: au pain de doleur et à eaue d’angoisse.†⁶ The head of Maître Oudart de Bussy, who had turned down a place in parliament, was exhumed by special order of Louis XI and, dressed with a crimson, fur-lined hood, selon la mode des conseillers de parlement,‡⁷ was put on display with an attached explanatory poem in the town square of Hesdin. The king himself writes about this case with grim humor.⁹

Rarer than the processions and executions were the sermons given by itinerant preachers who came, from time to time, to stir the people with their words. We, readers of newspapers, can hardly imagine anymore the tremendous impact of the spoken word on naive and ignorant minds. The popular preacher Brother Richard, who may have served Jeanne d’Arc as father confessor, preached in Paris in 1429 for ten days running. He spoke from five until ten or eleven o’clock in the morning in the Cemetery of the Innocents—where the famous danse macabre had been painted—with his back to the bone chambers where skulls were piled up above the vaulted walkways to be viewed by the visitors. When he informed his audience after his tenth sermon that it would have to be his last since he had not received permission for any more, les gens grans et petiz plouroient si piteusement et si fondement, comme s’ilz veissent porter en terre leurs meilleurs amis, et lui aussi.*⁸ When he finally leaves Paris, the people believe that the next Sunday he will still preach at St. Denis; a large number, perhaps as many as six thousand, according to the Burgher of Paris, leave the city on Saturday evening and spend the night out in the fields in order to secure good places.¹⁰

Antoine Fradin, a Franciscan, was also prohibited from preaching in Paris, because he railed against evil government. But this is precisely what made him so beloved by the people. They guarded him day and night in the monastery of the Cordeliers; the women stood watch with their ammunition of ashes and stones ready. People laughed at the proclamation prohibiting the watch: the king knows nothing about it! When Fradin is finally banned and has to leave the city, the people give him an escort, crians et soupirans moult fort son departement.¹¹†⁹

In all cities where the saintly Dominican Vincent Ferrer comes to preach, the people, the magistrates, the clergy—including bishops and prelates—go out to welcome him, singing his praises. He travels with a large numbers of supporters, who, every evening after sunset, go on processions with flagellations and songs. In every town he is joined by new followers. He has carefully arranged for the food and lodging of all his companions by employing men of spotless reputation as his quartermasters. Numerous priests from different orders travel with him so that they can assist him in taking confessions and celebrating mass. A few notaries accompany him to record the legal reconciliations that the holy preacher manages to arrange wherever he goes. When he preaches, a wooden frame has to protect him and his entourage against the throngs who want to kiss his hand or his gown. Work comes to a standstill as long as he speaks. It was a rare occasion when he failed to move his audience to tears, and when he spoke of Judgment Day and the pains of hell or of the sufferings of the Lord, he, just as his audience, broke into such great tears that he had to remain silent, for a time, until the weeping had stopped. The penitents fell to their knees before all the onlookers to tearfully confess their great sins.¹² When the famous Olivier Maillard gave the Lenten sermon at Orléans in 1485, so many people climbed on the roofs of the houses that the roofers submitted claims for sixty-four days of repair work.¹³

All this has the atmosphere of the English-American revivals or of the Salvation Army, but boundlessly extended and much more publicly exposed. There is no reason to suspect that the descriptions of Ferrer’s impact are pious exaggerations by his biographers. The sober and dry Monstrelet describes in almost the same manner the impact of the sermons of a certain Brother Thomas—claiming to be a Carmelite, but later found to be an imposter—in northern France and Flanders in 1498. He, too, was escorted into the city by the magistrate while nobles held the reins of his mules; and for his sake many, among them notables whom Monstrelet identifies by name, left home and servants to follow him wherever he went. The prominent burghers erected high pulpits for him and draped them with the most expensive tapestries they could find.

Next to the popular preacher’s accounts of the Passion and the Last Things, his attacks on luxury and vanity deeply moved his listeners. The people, Monstrelet writes, were particularly grateful to and fond of Brother Thomas because he attacked ostentation and displays of vanity and especially because he heaped criticism on nobility and clergy. He liked to set small boys (with the promise of indulgences, claims Monstrelet) on those noble ladies who ventured among the congregation wearing their high coiffures, crying au hennin! au hennin!¹⁴ so that women during the entire period no longer dared to wear hennins and began to wear hoods like the Beguines.¹⁵ Mais à l’exemple du lymeçon, says the faithful chronicler, lequel quand on passe près de luy retrait ses cornes par dedens et quand il ne ot plus riens les reboute dehors, ainsy firent ycelles. Car en assez brief terme après que ledit prescheur se fust départy du pays, elles mesmes recommencèrent comme devant et oublièrent sa doctrine, et reprinrent petit à petit leur viel estat, tel ou plus grant qu’elles avoient accoustumé de porter.¹⁶*¹⁰

Brother Richard, as well as Brother Thomas, lit funeral pyres of the vanities, just as Florence was to do in 1497 to such an unprecedented extent, and with such irreplaceable losses for art, at the will of Savonarola. In Paris and Artois, in 1428 and 1429, such actions remained confined to the destruction of playing cards, game boards, dice, hair ornaments, and various baubles that were willingly handed over by men and women. In fifteenth-century France and Italy, these funeral pyres were a frequently repeated expression of the deep piety aroused by the preachers.¹⁷ The turning away from vanity and lust on the part of the remorseful had become embodied in ceremonial form; passionate piety was stylized into solemn communal acts, just as those times tended to turn everything into stylized forms.

We have to transpose ourselves into this impressionability of mind, into this sensitivity to tears and spiritual repentance, into this susceptibility, before we can judge how colorful and intensive life was then.

Scenes of public mourning appeared to be responses to genuine calamities. During the funeral of Charles VII, the people lost their composure when the funeral procession came into view: all court officials vestus de dueil angoisseux, lesquelz il faisoit moult piteux veoir; et de la grant tristesse et courroux qu’on leur veoit porter pour la mort de leur dit maistre, furent grant pleurs et lamentacions faictes parmy tout ladicte ville.†¹¹ There were six page boys of the king riding six horses draped entirely in black velvet: Et Dieu scet le doloreux et piteux dueil qu’ilz faisoient pour leur dit maistre. One of the lads was so saddened that he did not eat nor drink for four days, said the people with great emotion.¹⁸‡¹²

But a surplus of tears came not only from great mourning, a vigorous sermon, or the mysteries of faith. Each secular festival also unleashed a flood of tears. An envoy from the King of France to Philip the Good repeatedly breaks into tears during his address. When young John of Coimbra is given his farewell at the Burgundian court, everyone weeps loudly, just as happened on the occasion when the Dauphin was welcomed or during the meeting of the Kings of England and France at Ardres. King Louis XI was observed to shed tears while making his entry into Arras; during his time as Crown Prince at the court of Burgundy, he is described by Chastellain as sobbing or crying on several occasions.¹⁹ Understandably, these accounts are exaggerated: compare them to the there wasn’t a dry eye in the house of a newspaper report. In his description of the peace congress at Arras in 1435, Jean Germain makes the audience fall to the ground filled with emotions, speechless, sighing, sobbing and crying during the moving addresses by the delegates.²⁰ This, most likely, did not happen in this manner, but the bishop of Chalons found that it had to be that way. In the exaggeration, one can detect the underlying truth. The same holds true for the floods of tears ascribed to the sensitive minds of the eighteenth century; weeping was both edifying and beautiful. Furthermore, who does not know, even today, the strong emotions, even goose flesh and tears, solemn entry processions can arouse even if the prince who is at the center of all this pomp leaves us indifferent? During those times, such an unmediated emotional state was filled with a half-religious veneration of pomp and greatness and vented itself in genuine tears.

Those who do not comprehend this difference in susceptibility between the fifteenth century and our time may be able to come to appreciate it through a small example from a sphere divorced from that of tears; that is, the sphere of sudden rage. To us, there is hardly a game more peaceful and quiet than chess. La Marche says that during chess games fights break out et que le plus saige y pert patience.²¹*¹³ A conflict between royal princes over a chessboard was still as plausible as a motive in the fifteenth century as in Carolingian romance.

Daily life offered unlimited range for acts of flaming passion and childish imagination. Our medieval historians who prefer to rely as much as possible on official documents because the chronicles are unreliable fall thereby victim to an occasionally dangerous error. The documents tell us little about the difference in tone that separates us from those times; they let us forget the fervent pathos of medieval life. Of all the passions permeating medieval life with their color, only two are mentioned, as a rule by legal documents: greed and quarrelsomeness. Who has not frequently wondered about the nearly incredible violence and stubbornness with which greed, pugnacity, or vindictiveness rise to prominence in the court documents of that period! It is only in the general context of the passions that inflame every sphere of life that these tensions become acceptable and intelligible to us. This is why the authors of the chronicles, no matter how superficial they may be with respect to the actual facts and no matter how often they may err in reporting them, are indispensable if we want to understand that age correctly.

In many respects life still wore the color of fairy tales. If the court chroniclers, learned and respected men who knew their princes intimately, were unable to see and describe these distinguished persons other than in terms of archaic and hieratic figures, how great the magic splendor of royalty must have been in the naive imagination of the people. Here is an example of that fairy-tale quality from the historical writings of Chastellain: The young Charles the Bold, still the count of Charolais, has arrived from Sluis of Gorkum, and learns there that his father, the duke, has canceled his pension and all of his benefices. Chastellain now proceeds to describe how the count assembles all his retainers, down to the kitchen boys, and informs them of his misfortunes in a moving address in which he proclaims his respect for his father, his concern for the wellbeing of his people, and his love for them all. Those who have means of their own he asks to await his fate along with him; those who are poor he sets free to go and, if they should happen to learn that the count’s fortune had taken a turn for the better, return then and you shall find your positions waiting, and you shall be welcomed by me, and I shall reward the patience you have shown for my sake. Lors oyt-l’on voix lever et larmes espandre et clameur ruer par commun accord: Nous tous, nous tous, monseigneur, vivrons avecques vous et mourrons.*¹⁴ Deeply moved, Charles accepts their offer of fidelity: Or vivez doncques et souffrez; et moy je souffreray pour vous, premier que vous ayez faute.*¹⁵ Thereupon the noblemen approach and offer him all their possessions, disant l’un: j’ay mille, l’autre: dix mille, l’autre: j’ay cecy, j’ay cela pour mettre pour vous et pour attendre tout vostre advenir.†¹⁶ And everything went on as usual and there was not a single chicken lacking in the kitchen because of all this.²²

The embellishments of this picture are, of course, Chastellain’s. We do not know how far his report stylized what had actually happened. But what really matters is that he sees the prince in the simple forms of the folk ballads. To him, the entire situation is totally dominated by the most primitive emotions of mutual loyalty, which express themselves with epic simplicity.

While the mechanism of the administration of the state and the state budget had in reality already assumed complicated forms, politics were embodied in the minds of the people in particular, invariable, simple figures. The political references with which the people live are those of the folk song and chivalric romances. Similarly, the kings of the period are reduced to a few types, each of which more or less correspond to a motif from song or adventure story: the noble, just prince, the prince betrayed by evil counselors, the prince as avenger of his family’s honor, the prince supported by his followers during reverses in his fortune. The subjects of a late medieval state, carrying a heavy burden and being without any voice in the administration of the taxes, lived in constant apprehension that their pennies would be wasted, suspecting that they were not actually spent for the benefit and welfare of the country. This suspicion directed towards the administration of the state was transposed into the simplified notion that the king is surrounded by greedy, tricky advisers or that the ostentation and wastefulness of the royal court was to blame for the poor state of the country. Thus political questions were reduced, in the popular mind, to the typical events of a fairy tale. Philip the Good understood what sort of language would be intelligible to the people. During his festivities in The Hague in 1456 he had displayed in a room adjacent to the Knight’s Hall precious utensils worth thirty thousand marks in order to impress the Dutch and Frisians who believed that he lacked the funds to take over the Bishopric of Utrecht. Everyone could come there to see the display. Moreover, two boxes containing one hundred thousand golden lions each had been brought from Lille. People were allowed to try to lift them, but tried in vain.²³ Can anyone imagine a more pedagogically skillful mixture of state credit and county-fair amusement?

The lives and deeds of the princes occasionally display a fantastic element that is reminiscent of the Caliph of Thousand and One Nights. In the midst of coolly calculated political undertakings, the heroes may occasionally display a daring bravado, or even risk their lives and personal achievements on a whim. Edward III gambled with his own life, that of the Prince of Wales, and the fate of his country by attacking a fleet of Spanish merchant vessels in order to exact vengeance for some acts of piracy.²⁴ Philip the Good had taken it into his head to marry one of his archers to the daughter of a rich brewer in Lille. When the father resisted and involved the parliament of Paris in the affair, the enraged duke suddenly broke off the important affairs of state that had kept him in Holland and, even though it was the holy season preceding Easter, undertook a dangerous sea voyage from Rotterdam to Sluis to have his. own way.²⁵ Another time in a blinding rage over a quarrel with his son, he ran away from Brussels and lost his way in the forest like a truant schoolboy. When he finally returns, the delicate task of getting him back to his normal routine falls to the knight Phillipe Pot. This adroit courtier finds the right words: Bonjour monseigneur, bonjour qu’est cecy? Faites-vous du roy Artus maintenant ou de messire Lancelot?²⁶*¹⁷

How caliph-like it seems to us when the same duke, being told by his physician to have his head shaved, issues an order that all noblemen are to follow his example and orders Peter von Hagenbach to strip the hair from any who fail to comply.²⁷ Or when the young King Charles VI of France, riding on one horse with a friend in order to witness the entry procession of his own bride, Isabella of Bavaria, was, in the press of the crowd, thrashed by the guards.²⁸ A poet complains that princes promote their jesters or musicians to the position of councilor or minister as indeed happened to Coquinet the Fool of Burgundy.²⁹

Politics are not yet completely in the grip of bureaucracy and protocol; at any moment the prince may abandon them and look elsewhere for guidelines for his administration. Fifteenth-century princes repeatedly consulted visionary ascetics and renowned popular preachers on matters of state. Denis the Carthusian and Vincent Ferrer served as political advisers; the noisy popular preacher Olivier Maillard was privy to the most secret negotiations between princely courts.³⁰ Because of this, an element of religious tension³¹ exists in the highest realms of politics.

At the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries, the people, observing the higher realms of princely life and fate, must have, more than ever, thought of it as a bloody romantic sphere filled with dramas of unmitigated tragedy, and the most moving falls from majesty and glory. During the same September month of 1399 when the English Parliament, meeting in Westminster, learned that King Richard II had been defeated and imprisoned by his cousin Lancaster and had resigned the throne, the German electors were gathered in Mainz to depose their king, Wenzel of Luxemburg. The latter was just as vacillating in spirit, incapable of ruling and as moody as his cousin in England, but did not come to as tragic an end as Richard. Wenzel remained for many years King of Bohemia, while Richard’s deposition was followed by his mysterious death in prison, which recalled the murder of his grand-father, Edward II, also in prison,