Johan Huizinga

Johan Huizinga was a Dutch historian of culture, professor at Leiden, who in The Waning of the Middle Ages of 1919 described the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in France and Burgundy not as the dawn of the Renaissance but as the overripe end of the medieval, its chivalry, piety, art and violence all pitched at an intensity that could not last. Homo Ludens argued that culture arises in play. He was dismissed and interned by the German occupiers for his criticism of Nazism and died in February 1945, months before liberation. He wrote history as a picture rather than an argument, and the picture has held.