Johan Huizinga, Dutch historian (1872-1945)

 

Last year marked the 

centenary of the birth, in Groningen in 1872, of the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. To justify this commemoration of an international scholar by a non-historian, I might join J. Kamerbeek, jr., Professor of Comparative Literature at Amsterdam University, in quoting the words of another non-historian, Paul Hazard: “L’histoire est une tentation pour l’historien de la littérature.” Yet Kamerbeek had less reason to explain his fascination with history than I have, for literary studies in the Netherlands have always been very closely associated with the study of history. This now is not the case in the Belgian university system. My apparent rashness, then, is prompted by my interest in the times that shaped Huizinga’s historical and other views and by the fact — which actually annuls the remarks made by Kamerbeek and Hazard — that it is far from certain that Huizinga was strictly a historian in the accepted sense of the word. Is he not something more, and something quite different ? Is he not rather an essayist and interpreter of trends in civilization ? It is in any case a fact that in many histories of Dutch literature Huizinga is recorded, the names of such historians as Romein, Geyl, Fruin in the Netherlands and Pirenne, Ganshof, Van Werveke in Belgium are not