"To the world when it was half a thousand years younger," [the author] begins, "the outline of all things seemed more clearly marked than to us." Life seemed to consist in extremes – a fierce religious asceticism and an unrestrained licentiousness, ferocious judicial punishments and great popular waves of pity and mercy, the most horrible crimes and the most extravagant acts of saintliness – and everywhere a sea of tears, for men have never wept so unrestrainedly as in those centuries.

This brilliant portrait of the life, thought, and art in France and the Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is our most trenchant study of that crucial moment in history when the Middle Ages gave way to the great energy of the Renaissance. From an analysis of the dominating ideas of the times – those that held the medieval world together, supported its religion and informed its art and literature – emerges the style of a whole culture at the extreme limit of its development.

Changing ideas about health and death.

Ein Klassiker der Kulturgeschichtsschreibung - vergleichbar mit Jakob Burkhardts "Kultur der Renaissance". Huizingas großes Panorama der Kultur des Spätmittelalters beruht auf der gründlichen Auswertung von Quellen des burgundischen und französischen Raums (einschließlich von Bildwerken, theologischen Texten und fiktionaler Literatur). Brilliant geschrieben und ein Lesegenuss. ( )

This is the older translation, superseded by
Autumn of the Middle Ages

excellent insights into how people change society. ( )