Book Autumn of the Middle Ages Dutch historian Johann Heuzinga (translated from German Dr. Strahinja K. Kostić) is considered the best-known and most important work of this prominent historian. The subtitle of the book is "Study on the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries" and indicates the basic issue that the book deals with.
It is a classic book that was published about a hundred years ago (1919) and is considered one of the most important works on the Middle Ages published to date. In the Croatian language, the book was published in 1964, i.e. 1991, and many international round tables and lectures were organized on the occasion of this, where prominent historians spoke about the content and significance of this book, which, among other things, talks in a special way about how the excessive formality and romanticism of late medieval court society could also be defense mechanisms against the ever-growing violence and brutality of society in general.
This book also reveals how almost all events in the lives of people of that time had much clearer, in every sense more pronounced external forms than they had a century later. Thus, the distance between misfortune and pain on the one hand and joy on the other seemed greater than it seems to us today. Namely, every significant event was set to contribute to the sublimity of an established lifestyle. Because of this, events such as birth, marriage, death, and the like, were shrouded in the glow of divine mystery with appropriate rituals and rites that were rarely omitted.
Of course, less important events did not go unnoticed. Going on trips, visits, even the most ordinary ones - relatives, starting a new business, were accompanied by a multitude of well-established and usual actions, but also those that are much rarer, specific to a certain event. All this is accompanied by the pronouncement of an abundance of blessings, sayings and even ceremonies. The miseries and privations that came frequently and violently, causing great harm and suffering to people, could not remain unnoticed either. Maximum attention was paid to all of them, and perhaps only the most serious diseases were more noticeable than them.
Heuzinga says in this book that rich people enjoyed their wealth more strongly and more greedily than today and that they differed a lot from the miserable poor. On the other side, lepers wandered around, clattering with their rattles, beggars came to churches, lamented there and showed their poverty in various ways, expecting alms from well-dressed, fragrant and well-fed gentlemen.
At that time, every class, every order, every trade had clothes by which they could be recognized. Great gentlemen never went without luxurious and modern weapons made by top craftsmen, but also without a suitable personal escort. All their important events were publicly and loudly announced by their subjects. Sometimes it was accompanied by various processions, sometimes by very pleasant music and street entertainers of various kinds, but sometimes by excessive noise. The author says that it was basically a pretty ugly world. That the fire of hatred and violence rose high and that injustice was very powerful.
Heuzinga also notes that towards the end of the Middle Ages, bitter longing gave the basic tone to human life, because each era has its own particularities, has its own specificity, and in each of them, regardless of what it really is, people longed for a more beautiful world. . And the worse an era was, the deeper the despair and pain, the stronger this longing became. And whether life was then more unhappy than usual, this book does not give a decisive answer. Regardless of which traditions from that era a person had at hand, the answer will be mostly the same, because every era in tradition leaves more traces of its misery than of its happiness. In the context of this, the author himself says that - painful destinies become history. That the sum of life's happiness granted to people in various eras does not differ much from each other, and that the splendor of medieval happiness lives mostly in folk songs, in music. However, in the fifteenth century it was not common to loudly celebrate life and the world. There was more mention of pain and despair. Optimism that grew out of the Renaissance, to experience its period of true flowering in the eighteenth century, was still foreign to the French spirit of the fifteenth century.
In the book Autumn of the Middle Ages Heuzinga talks about the beginning of the acceptance of medieval forms of culture as their own new cultural values. At the end of the eighteenth century, actually at the beginning of Romanticism, chivalry was first noticed. Early Romanticism tended to equate the Middle Ages with the Age of Chivalry in some way. A thorough study led to the conclusion that chivalry is still only a part of the culture of that period, that political and social development mostly goes beyond that form.
Heuzinga states that the period of real feudalism and the flourishing of chivalry ends already in the thirteenth century. After that comes the city-princely period of the Middle Ages, in which the trading power of the citizens and the monetary power of the princes based on it are the ruling factor in the state. Those who came later were already used to looking at the advanced and large cities of Europe, above all Ghent in Belgium and Augsburg in Bavaria, therefore, much more at the emergence of capitalism and new forms of the state, than at the nobility whose power, less more, was already exhaling. Historical research itself had already become democratized since the era of romanticism. For those who were used to looking at the later Middle Ages from economic or political aspects, it is easy to see that the sources, especially the narrative ones, give much more space to the nobility and its life than it corresponds to our presentation. This also applies to the seventeenth century, mostly because the noble form of life retained its dominance in society long after the nobility, within society, lost its predominant importance. In the fifteenth century, the nobility as a social element occupied the first place and its importance was great.
In this book, Heuzinga says that in the Middle Ages, the notion of dividing society into classes permeated all theological and political considerations. That it had not only a greater value but also a wider meaning. Namely, it is said that God created the common people to work, to cultivate the land, to ensure life through trade, the priesthood for jobs related to religion, and the nobility to promote virtue and defend justice, to be a role model for others with their deeds and exemplary life. Honor is the pivot of noble life and it was born from stylized and lofty arrogance. The pursuit of knightly glory and honor is inseparably connected with the respect of heroes, in which medieval and renaissance elements merge. Heuzinga notes that wherever the chivalrous ideal was most clearly expressed, the emphasis fell on the ascetic element. At the time of his first progress, he associated himself with the monastic ideal, and when reality became stronger than the ideal, he retreated into the realm of fantasy. By connecting the chivalrous ideal with high values of religious consciousness: pity, justice, faithfulness, it is neither artificial nor superficial, but still it does not create a beautiful form of life from chivalry. This strong trait of brave self-sacrifice is characteristic of the chivalric ideal, and it is connected to the erotic background and towards life. A knight and chosen one of the heart, being a hero for love is the primary and unchanging romantic motive that always arises and must arise again and again everywhere. It is the immediate transformation of sensual passion into ethical, or quasi-ethical self-denial. There is a need to show courage in front of a woman, to show strength. The dream of a heroic deed for love grows and develops. A woman's understanding of love is veiled and remains a deep secret. A woman does not need a romantic elevation to heroism.
The image of a noble knight who suffers because of his sweetheart is primarily an image in which a man wants to see himself. The charm of the noble lifestyle is so great that citizens embrace it whenever they can.
In the Book Autumn of the Middle Ages it is said that the later Middle Ages is one of the final periods in which the cultural life of the upper circles almost completely turned into a social game.
The whole embellishment of noble love can seem unbearable and ridiculous to us. In the works of many writers, old age no longer echoes in the verses of poets: it still lives only in the voice of lonely poets. But what meaning did it have as an ornament of life, as an expression of feelings.
Wearing a veil, or clothing of a beloved woman, which transmits the smell of hair or body, immediately shows the erotic moment of the knight's tournament.
In this regard, in France, for example, and in countries that were under the influence of the French spirit, things took a different turn because the forms of this system were inspired by the spirit of other nations. The real history of the late Middle Ages, says the researcher, has little to do with the false chivalric renaissance. In this book, it is especially emphasized that the people who created history were not dreamers but sober statesmen, princes, nobles.
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