Huizinga, J., Dutch Civilization in the Seventeenth Century and other essays (1968),
288p.
Jakob Herman Huizinga (1872-1945) is probably the best-known Dutch historian
internationally. His international fame, however, is not in Dutch history, but for his
cultural history of late medieval Europe, first published in 1924 and republished in 1996
as The Autumn of the Middle Ages. In addition his pioneering theoretical essays on
cultural history during the 1930s have been widely recognized as path breaking and are
seen as one of the foundations of the new cultural history. He started out as a student of
Indo-Germanic languages and studied comparative linguistics His 1895 PhD dissertation
was on Indian literature. Subsequently he turned to European Medieval and Renaissance
history and became a Professor of History at Leiden University. During the 1930s he was
critical of Fascism and spoke out publicly against the Germans during their occupation of
the Netherlands when they closed Leiden University’s library in 1942. He was banished
by the Germans to a small village in Gelderland in 1942 and died there during the hunger
winter shortly before the liberation in 1945.
This volume contains a translation of his famous essay, “Dutch Civilization in the
Seventeenth Century,” first published in 1941, as well as “The Spirit of the Netherlands”
(1935), “The Netherlands as Mediator between Western and Central Europe” (1933),
“Two Wrestlers with the Angel” (1921) on Oswald Spengler and H. G, Wells, “The
Aesthetic Element in Historical Thought” (1905) and “My Path to History” (1947). In
these essays, and especially in his famous essay on the seventeenth century, he put
forward the now widely accepted notion that the bourgeois and relatively egalitarian
culture of the seventeenth century Dutch Republic was unique in Europe at the time and
played a major role in shaping historical interpretation of the Republic’s Golden Age. He
stressed its tradition of freedom of conscience, the relative religious toleration, its
Republican political culture of the ‘true freedom,’ and its literary, artistic, philosophical,
and scientific achievements that were seen as unique in Europe and provided a new
direction for European civilization. He especially contrasted the relative freedom of
Dutch bourgeois society with the aristocratic and more authoritarian culture of Louis
XIV’s France. His central claim was that the Republic’s bourgeois culture was more
ethical than the aristocratic cultures of its neighbors. Huizinga paid a great deal of
attention to visual images and his art criticism has been influential in the history of art
While modern Dutch historians have become much more critical of Dutch culture in the
Golden Age than Huizinga’s idealistic views, which no doubt also owed something to the
contrast with Nazi culture and the German occupation of the Netherlands, Huizinga’s
interpretation of the Dutch Golden Age remains an important influence on the national
identity of the Dutch in our own time.