The Waning of the Middle Ages

At the crossroads a hanged man sways while the crowd around him eats, laughs, and weeps in the same breath, then heads home elated, as if grief and festival were the same emotion wearing different clothes. Johan Huizinga built his history of the fifteenth-century Burgundian world out of moments exactly this immoderate: nobles swearing a crusade oath over a roasted pheasant at one of the most lavish banquets Europe had ever staged, painters filling cemetery walls with skeletons that lead popes and paupers by the hand toward one identical grave. He calls this not a birth but a waning, the last exhausted flowering of medieval forms grown too ornate and too brittle to mean what they once meant, chivalry curdled into costume, piety curdled into spectacle. What lingers is not argument but atmosphere: a world that felt everything at full volume, right up until the volume broke it. You leave this book understanding, for the first time, why an age drowning in beauty could also be dying of it.