Essays in Golden Age Dutch Culture by Lisa Jardine

Author:Lisa Jardine [Jardine, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910634073
Publisher: UCL Press
Published: 2015-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

6

The Afterlife of Homo Ludens: From Johan Huizinga to Natalie Zemon Davis and Beyond

It was not my object to define the place of play among all other manifestations of culture, but rather to ascertain how far culture itself bears the character of play. (Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, Foreword)

For us Homo ludens is a more complex person … and modern theoreticians have tried to sort out his games as they appear and are used in different cultures. (Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘The reasons of misrule: Youth groups and charivaris in sixteenth-century France’, Past & Present 50 [1971], 48–9)

This is an essay about the continuing importance, for the English-speaking world, of Johan Huizinga’s innovative approach to cultural history, especially as articulated in his often cited (but rather less often read) work, Homo Ludens (first published in Dutch in 1938, first English translation 1949, first generally available edition 1955).1

Huizinga is a master story-teller, whose material is drawn from the everyday detail, literature and poetry of the late middle ages, and who weaves documented incident and event into a richly varied tapestry of the forms of ‘life, art and thought’ of ordinary people in France and Holland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Here is how he captures the way in which, in the fifteenth century, the ‘cruel reality’ of inevitable physical suffering and violent death was compensated for by the use of elaborate rituals and exaggerated displays of public grief. These, according to Huizinga, ‘made life an art’, transforming grim experience to make it tolerable: ‘The cultural value of ritualised mourning,’ he writes, ‘is that it gives grief its form and rhythm. It transfers actual life to the sphere of the drama. Mourning at the court of France or of Burgundy dramatised the effects of grief.’

The idea which today we can understand to be central to Huizinga’s Homo Ludens is a richly suggestive methodological one. If we regard systematic (public and private) forms of human behaviour as potentially rule-governed ‘games’, then the strategies used within communities by ‘players’ to modify, ironise or subvert the rules of the game can be scrutinised by the cultural historian for their capacity to illuminate the way social structures inform and shape the behaviour of individuals.2

Real civilization [writes Huizinga] cannot exist in the absence of a play-element, for civilization presupposes limitation and mastery of the self, the ability not to confuse its own tendencies with the ultimate and highest goal, but to understand that it is enclosed within certain bounds freely accepted. Civilization will, in a sense, always be played according to certain rules.3

And he adds a final point, to which we will return: ‘True civilization will always demand fair play. Fair play is nothing less than good faith expressed in play terms. Hence the cheat or the spoil-sport shatters civilization itself.’

My proposition, that Huizinga continues to exert significant current influence, may come as a surprise to you. Among those writing about Huizinga, particularly in the Netherlands, starting shortly after his death in 1945, there seems to have been a

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