Published originally in Polish in 19627, it achieved bestseller status and acclaim as the best work of its kind in the world.

Alan of Lille was a notable figure in the second half of the twelfth century as a theologian and as a poet and he has seemed as rich and individual a writer to modern scholars as he did to his own contemporaries. This study examines his work as a whole, in an attempt to set his well-known literary achievement in the context of his theological writings. He was in many ways a pioneer, an experimenter with several of the new genres (...) of his day, an innovator both as a teacher and as an author. He was not an original thinker so much as an eclectic, drawing on a wide range of the sources available to his contemporaries. He shows us what might be done by a lively-minded scholar with the resources of the day, within the schools of late twelfth-century France, to bring theology alive and make it interesting and challenging to his readers. (shrink)

2016 Reprint of 1924 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Huizinga had an aesthetic approach to history, where art and spectacle played an important part. This is his most famous work, wherein he here reinterpreted the Late Middle Ages as a period of pessimism and decadence rather than rebirth. "The Waning of the Middle Ages" is his masterpiece, a study of the forms of life of fifteenth-century France and Burgundy, based upon his critical (...) reading of aesthetic and philological sources normally overlooked by the working historian. Huizinga attempted to do for the late medieval North what his acknowledged master, Jacob Burckhardt, had done for the Italian Renaissance. (shrink)

"Prompted by modern critical discussions, the fourteen papers, lectures and articles assembled in this volume revolve around issues raised by twentieth-century art and theory."--Amazon.