Erasmus and the Age of Reformation | Page 2

University of
Amsterdam on Sanskrit, and it was almost an accident that he became
professor of history in the University of his native town. All through
his life it was characteristic of him that after a spell of creative work,
when he had finished a book, he would turn aside from the subject that
had absorbed him and plunge into some other subject or period, so that
the books and articles in the eight volumes of his collected works (with
one more volume still to come) cover a very wide range. As time went
on he examined aspects of history which at first he had passed over,
and he acquired a clear insight into the political and economic life of
the past. It has been well said of him that he never became either a
pedant or a doctrinaire. During the ten years that he spent as professor
at Groningen, he found himself. He was happily married, with a
growing family, and the many elements of his mind drew together into
a unity. His sensitiveness to style and beauty came to terms with his
conscientious scholarship. He was rooted in the traditional freedoms of
his national and academic environment, but his curiosity, like the
historical adventures of his people and his profession, was not limited
by time or space or prejudice. He came more and more definitely to
find his central theme in civilization as a realized ideal, something that
men have created in an endless variety of forms, but always in order to
raise the level of their lives.
While this interior fulfilment was bringing Huizinga to his best, the
world about him changed completely. In 1914, Holland became a
neutral country surrounded by nations at war. In 1914, also, his wife
died, and it was as a lonely widower that he was appointed in the next
year to the chair of general history at Leyden, which he was to hold for

the rest of his academic life. Yet the year after the end of the war saw
the publication of his masterpiece, the book which gave him his high
place among historical writers and was translated as The Waning of the
Middle Ages. This is a study of the forms of life and thought in France
and the Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the last
phase of one of the great European eras of civilization. In England,
where the Middle Ages had been idealized for generations, some of its
leading thoughts did not seem so novel as they did in Holland, where
many people regarded the Renaissance and more still regarded the
Reformation as a new beginning of a better world; but in England and
America, which had been drawn, unlike Holland, into the vortex of war,
it had the poignancy of a recall to the standards of reasonableness. It
will long maintain its place as a historical book and as a work of
literature.
The shorter book on Erasmus is a companion to this great work. It was
first published in 1924 and so belongs to the same best period of the
author. Its subject is the central intellectual figure of the next
generation after the period which Huizinga called the waning, or rather
the autumn, of the Middle Ages; but Erasmus was also, as will appear
from many of its pages, a man for whom he had a very special
sympathy. Something of what he wrote about Erasmus might also have
been written about himself, or at least about his own response to the
transformation of the world that he had known.
This is not the place for an analysis of that questioning and illuminating
response, nor for a considered estimate of Huizinga's work as a whole;
but there is room for a word about his last years. He was recognized as
one of the intellectual leaders of his country, and a second marriage in
1937 brought back his private happiness; but the shadows were
darkening over the western world. From the time when national
socialism began to reveal itself in Germany, he took his stand against it
with perfect simplicity and calm. After the invasion of Holland he
addressed these memorable words to some of his colleagues: 'When it
comes, as it soon will, to defending our University and the freedom of
science and learning in the Netherlands, we must be ready to give
everything for that: our possessions, our freedom, and even our lives'.

The Germans closed the University. For a time they held Johan
Huizinga, now an old man and in failing health, as a hostage; then they
banished him to open arrest in a remote parish in the eastern part of the
country. Even in these conditions he still wrote, and wrote well. In the
last winter of the war the liberating