Huizinga, Prophet of 'Blood & Roses'
Peter Burke on a pioneering historian of 'spirit of the age', who pushed back the frontiers of cultural history.
Johan Huizinga is one of the outstanding cultural historians of the twentieth century. He was a man of wide interests, so wide that he found it difficult to settle down and specialise in history, let alone a particular period. As a student, at the university of Groningen in the 1890s, he was a member of a group of aesthetes who cultivated the fashionable mood of decadence and read Huysmans and Verlaine. He became interested in Buddhism, learned Sanskrit, and (although distracted from his philological studies by Wagner's operas), he wrote a thesis on the role of the clown in the ancient Indian drama. At one point he thought of working on the history of Islam.
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