| Popis: |
Neither Huizinga's main biographers nor his principal commentators have ever explicitly considered the problem of the city or urban culture in his writings. This question never seemed to interest the author of the Herfstty der Middeleeuwen and, with some exceptions, it remains conspicuously absent in a work giving central importance to court culture. Yet the 'century of Burgundy' was obviously not one of courtly splendor alone; it was also one of a vivid urban culture in the metropolitan centers of the northern dominions of the Valois dukes. We argue that Huizinga's hermeneutic method was certainly a fruitful and evocative one but its fundamental shortcoming in this respect was paramount. Huizinga was not a historian of whom one could expect an histoire totale, taking into account the life and thought forms of all social classes. Rather, he endeavored to offer an aesthetic vision of medieval society where cities occupied a peripheral place, like in the margin of a medieval convex mirror. |
