Johan Huizinga and Central/East-Central Europe

In the second half of the 20th century, the influence of the renowned Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) exceeded the borders of the Netherlands and of the scholarly discipline that he himself primarily represented and struck across several disciplines to affect the development of international humanities. If we were to name just two of the most famous cases of this influence, then they would certainly include the inspiration engendered by his medievalist studies – especially The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919) – among the first and the second generation of the French Annales School (especially Jacques Le Goff), and consequently his influence on the development of the modern history of mentalities, the history of the quotidian and social history; and secondly, the critical reception, among the circle of the former Collège de sociologie (Georges Battaile, Roger Caillois and others), of Huizinga’s cultural-anthropological concept of play as the basis of culture, which the author best formulated in his work Homo Ludens (1938).