Postscript

Abstract

The reader of this volume may not have the impression that nowadays, nearly twenty years after Huizinga’s death, a consensus about his work, his ideas and his place in the history of historiography has been reached. On the contrary, he will be able to see more clearly than ever in how many respects and on how many levels present-day readers of Huizinga’s oeuvre vary in their interpretations of its precise meaning. If the papers collected here may be considered representative of expert opinion, it is obvious that the value of Huizinga’s writings is beyond dispute. But whether Huizinga was a conservative or a liberal, a deeply religious man with mystical proclivities or a thinker of Erasmian tendency, profoundly sympathetic to humanist rationality; whether as an historian he was an innovator or a man who in the great methodological debate of the fin-de siècle between ‘individualistic’ and ‘collectivistic’, history opted for the old-fashioned and the traditional; whether he was pessimistic about the future of civilization or, with many reservations, fundamentally an optimist; whether he was a maladjusted man, an alien in the society and culture in which he had to spend his life, or a commentator endowed with such perspicacity that he was able to analyse his own times with astonishing precision — all these questions have been left unresolved. Apparently the debate about Huizinga has not yet been concluded and the uncertainties about his intentions and his position, which have accompanied his publications from the start, still remain.