I have been reading The Waning of the Middle Ages: a study of the forms of life, thought and art in France and the Netherlands in the XIV and XV centuries written in 1919 by Johan Huizinga. A new translation was published in 1996 by the University of Chicago Press, but this copy (I swiped it from my friend’s place in Winter Harbor, Maine) is still pretty rad. My favorite passages are the ones that compare “then” and “now” because the “now” of Huizinga’s day has passed into history, and so there is a sense of reading two histories: an account of the middle ages through the lens of early twentieth century modernity.

For example, from chapter one (”the violent tenor of life”):

“A present day reader, studying the history of the middle ages based on official documents, will never sufficiently realise the extreme excitability of the medieval soul. The picture drawn mainly from official records, though they may be the most reliable sources, will lack one element: that of the vehement passion possessing princes and peoples alike. To be sure, the passionate element is not absent from modern politics, but it is now restrained and diverted for the most part by the complicated mechanism of social life. Five centuries ago it still made frequent and violent eruptions into practical politics, upsetting rational schemes.”

And from chapter two (”the idea of chivalry”):

“The conception of chivalry constituted for these authors a sort of magic key, by the aid of which they explained to themselves the motives and politics of history. The confused image of contemporaneous history being much too complicated for their comprehension, they simplified it … by the fiction of chivalry as a moving force. A very fantastic and shallow point of view, no doubt. How much vaster is ours, embracing all sorts of economic and social forces and causes.”

So, if “chivalry” was the meta narrative (or “fiction” in Huizinga’s words) of the medieval historian, he suggests that the modern historian has more sophisticated tools with which to organise and interpret present-day events. And I agree with him. But do we, moderns or post-moderns, come any closer to a full understanding of the world in which we live? A model is by definition a simplified representation; is our understanding of the world any more perfect than Chastellain’s understanding of the Burgundian court? Is our world actually more complex?

Jeff says yes, because the connections between modern people are more global, and because there is greater interdependency among a greater number of players. I agree with that analysis, but I also wonder: what complexities of the medieval world have been lost or forgotten by the modern world?

Looking at a detail of the fifteenth century Netherlandish painting “Descent from the cross” attributed to a “Master of the embroidered foliage” at the Detroit Institute of Arts one sees Jesus deposed from the cross in an ecstasy of sumptuous textiles. This was painted during a time when “torture and executions are enjoyed by the spectators like an entertainment at a fair.” At the same time, the King of England, Edward IV, requests a record of the “pantagruelian” kitchen regulations practised in the Burgundian court, where “the meals of the duke were ceremonies of a dignity that was almost liturgic.” Actually, the middle ages sound a lot like a Brett Easton Ellis novel.