So begins one of the most famous works of history ever published,
Johan Huizinga's The Autumn of the Middle Ages. 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 with all other European-language
translations. Now, for the first time ever, the original version of
this classic work has been translated into English. Herfsttij der
Middeleeuwen, or The Autumn of the Middle Ages - the original title
- is a brilliant portrait of life, thought, and art in fourteenth-
and fifteenth- century France and the Netherlands. For Huizinga,
this period marked not the birth of a dramatically new era in
history, the Renaissance, but the fullest, ripest phase of medieval
life and thought. Criticized both at home and in Europe for being
"old-fashioned" and "too literary" when first published in 1919,
the book is now recognized not only for its quality and richness as
history, but also as a precursor to the Annales "histoire des
mentalites" school of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, two of the few
reviewers who praised the book initially. In the 1924 translation,
Fritz Hopman adapted, reduced, and altered the Dutch edition -
softening Huizinga's often passionate arguments, dulling his
nuances, and eliminating theoretical passages. He dropped many
passages Huizinga had quoted in their original old French.
Additionally, chapters are rearranged and redivided, all references
are dropped, and mistranslations are introduced. This translation
corrects such errors, recreating the second Dutch edition - which
represents Huizinga's thinking at its most important stage - as
closely as possible.Everything that was dropped or rearranged has
been restored. Prose quotations appear in French, with translations
printed at the bottom of the page. Mistranslations have been
corrected. Payton and Mammitzsch also have added helpful material,
including Huizinga's preface to the first and second Dutch editions
(published in 1919 and 1921) and the one to the 1924 German
translation, where he touches on the book's title and offers some
thoughts on translations. Several notes clarify Huizinga's
references to things which would be common knowledge only to Dutch
readers. Huizinga frequently refers to paintings, sculptures, and
carvings, some little known; this edition is the first in any
language to include a full range of illustrations.
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