Renaissance Studies Vol. 15 No.

‘Renaissance’ and ‘fossilization’: Michelet,

Burckhardt, and Huizinga

JO TOLLEBEEK

In the study of the history of ideas, the question of where the ‘turning
points’ occur in that history is often the area in which differences between
the existing historiographic interpretations come to the surface. This is not
surprising, since the question forces historians to ref lect on tradition and
renewal, on the dynamics of the historical process, and on the status of the
conceptual tools they apply. This becomes apparent in an almost arche-
typical way in discussions about the Renaissance. From the moment of
its introduction into historiography, this concept has been associated with
change and modernization: the Renaissance was a new beginning, a ‘turning
point’.1 This essay will argue that this association forced the creation of
a new conception of the Middle Ages, that this heightened rather than
ameliorated the problem of the historical dynamic, and that the history of
ideas became inextricably interwoven in these discussions with a history of
ideals. These arguments will be based primarily on Michelet, Burckhardt,
and Huizinga.
The extent to which the Renaissance was initially equated with change and
renewal is apparent from the work of Jules Michelet (1798–1874). Michelet
can be regarded as the ‘inventor’ of the concept, although he was able
to draw from the Histoire des républiques italiennes au moyen âge (1807–26) by
J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, and from the even earlier Life of Lorenzo de’
Medici (1795) by William Roscoe, a biography which initiated a long English
Renaissance tradition embracing Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds,
and Vernon Lee.2 In 1840–1 Michelet, a frequent visitor to the Musée de la
Renaissance in the Louvre even in his younger years,3 dedicated his lectures at
This is the text of a paper at the conference ‘Turning Points’ (International Society for Intellectual History and
The Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago), Chicago, 21–24 September 2000.
1
For a general summary of the different interpretations of the Renaissance, see the older works of
H. Schulte Nordholt, Het beeld der Renaissance. Een historiografische studie (Amsterdam, 1948); W. K. Ferguson,
The Renaissance in Historical Thought. Five Centuries of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, 1948); and H. Baeyens,
Begrip en probleem van de Renaissance. Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van hun ontstaan en tot hun kunsthistorische
omschrijving (Leuven, 1952). For a recent overview of the debate on Middle Ages and Renaissance, see R. Starn,
‘Who’s afraid of the Renaissance?’, in J. van Engen (ed.), The Past and Future of Medieval Studies (Notre Dame
and London, 1994) 129–47.
2
See J. Hale, England and the Italian Renaissance (London, 1954) and H. Fraser, The Victorians and
Renaissance Italy (Oxford and Cambridge, MA, 1992).
3
F. Haskell, History and its Images. Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven and London, 1993), 274.
The Musée de la Renaissance was created in 1824.

© 2001 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Oxford University Press

 ‘Renaissance’ and ‘fossilization’: Michelet, Burckhardt, and Huizinga 355
the Collège de France to the Renaissance. In his very first lecture he char-
acteized the Renaissance as a passage au monde moderne.4
The Révolutions d’Italie, which were published by his friend Edgar Quinet
in 1849, bolstered Michelet in this opinion.5 When in 1855, after six volumes
had been published on the Middle Ages and seven on the French Revolution,
the first volume appeared on the interim period of the Histoire de France,
it was devoted to the Renaissance. In this volume Michelet described the
meeting in the sixteenth century of France and Italy. This meeting gave rise
to a civilization which was entirely new: as Michelet claimed on the first
page, the Renaissance entailed ‘the discovery of the world, the discovery of
man’.6 In this formula, the passage au monde moderne was once again given
form.
In precisely the same year, 1855, in which Michelet’s Renaissance appeared,
Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97) published his Der Cicerone, two years after his
first book, Die Zeit Constantins des Großen. Der Cicerone was a historical guide
for those wishing to visit the art treasures of Italy. The Renaissance was
once again characterized as a movement of renewal, though this time from
a purely art historical standpoint. For example, in painting, according to
Burckhardt, a ‘new spirit’ had manifested itself in the first decades of the
fifteenth century.7
Burckhardt spent the next few years – first in Zurich, then in Basle – work-
ing on Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien.8 This book, which appeared in
1860, reopened the perspective: Die Kultur covered not only art, but also the
entire culture which had existed in Italy from the middle of the fourteenth
century up to the Sacco di Roma in 1527. For Burckhardt, too, the change
which the Renaissance had brought about went much further than merely a
renewed interest in antiquity. He returned to the formula of Michelet, but
elaborated this so systematically that Die Kultur led to the formation of a
completely new field of scientific study.9 Once again, the Renaissance was
seen as a ‘turning point’: the veil – Michelet had spoken of a ‘thick mist’10 –
of religion, delusion, and childish naivety which had lain over consciousness
before then had been blown away in Italy, not only creating more space for an
4
J. Michelet, Cours au Collège de France, ed. P. Viallaneix, with O.A. Haac and I. Tieder (Paris, 1995), I,
351–3.
5
See J. B. Bullen, The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-century Writing (Oxford, 1994), 156–82.
6
J. Michelet, Histoire de France au seizième siècle: Renaissance, ed. R. Casanova (Paris, 1978), 51.
7
J. Burckhardt, Der Cicerone. Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens (Basle 1860), III, 793 (cf. II,
585, on sculpture).
8
For an English translation, see J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans.
S. G. C. Middlemore, introduced by P. Burke and annotated by P. Murray (London, 1990); for an introduction,
see E. M. Janssen, Jacob Burckhardt und die Renaissance (Assen, 1970).
9
Among those testifying to the dominant position of Die Kultur in the study of the Renaissance are
P. O. Kristeller, ‘Changing views of the intellectual history of the Renaissance since Jacob Burckhardt’, in
T. Helton (ed.), The Renaissance. A Reconsideration of the Theories and Interpretations of the Age (Madison, 1961), 29
and D. Hay, ‘Historians and the Renaissance during the last twenty-five years’, in The Renaissance. Essays in
Interpretation (London and New York, 1982), 1–2, 5–7.
10
Michelet, Renaissance, 97.
356 Jo Tollebeek
objective approach to reality, but also enabling human subjectivity to break
through.11
The Renaissance worlds of Michelet and Burckhardt differed from each
other. The focus for the former was France and the sixteenth century; for the
latter the focus was on Italy and the fifteenth century. But for both authors
change was the dominant theme. In 1840 Michelet referred to the Renais-
sance as ‘the joyful dawning of a new day’.12 Felix Gilbert counted no less than
thirty passages in Die Kultur, in which the Renaissance was linked with
modernization.13

THE LIFELESS MIDDLE AGES

Associating the Renaissance so strongly with change and modernization also
created a need for a conceptual counterpart to this Renaissance notion. This
counterpart was found in the concept of ‘fossilization’. Ranged against the
Renaissance was a period which was seen as immobile, and which was said to
have been brought to an end precisely by the dynamic of the Renaissance.
This gave rise to an antagonistic relationship between the Renaissance and
the Middle Ages.
Die Kultur continually referred to the difference between the Renaissance
and the Middle Ages, not only in the central passage about the blowing away
of the ‘veil’, but also, for example, when discussing the social organization of
fifteenth-century Italy.14 Burckhardt occasionally let slip that this had been a
period of ‘progress’.15 But contrasting the Renaissance and the Middle Ages
did not lead him to characterize the Middle Ages as a period to be reviled.
Burckhardt was not an anti-medievalist.16
Michelet, by contrast, was.17 His initial appreciation of the Middle Ages,
and the art of that period, disappeared as early as the end of the 1830s.
In 1839 he informed his public at the Collège de France that the fifteenth
century had been ‘the night of ignorance’, in contrast to ‘the light’ of the
Renaissance.18 Fifteen years later this image was elaborated. Michelet pref-
aced his Renaissance with a lengthy introduction in which he presented the
civilization of the last three centuries of the Middle Ages as a completely

11
J. Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (Vienna, s.a.), 76.
12
J. Michelet, Journal, vol. 1: 1828–1848, ed. P. Viallaneix (Paris, 1959), 340.
13
F. Gilbert, History: Politics or Culture? Reflections on Ranke and Burckhardt (Princeton, 1990), 61, note 17.
14
Burckhardt, Die Kultur, 205. The omnipresence of the Middle Ages in the book was emphasized by
P. Ganz, ‘Jacob Burckhardts Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: Handwerk und Methode’, Deutsche
Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 62 (1988), 47–49.
15
Burckhardt, Die Kultur, 160.
16
Cf. H. Baron, ‘The limits of the notion of “Renaissance individualism”: Burckhardt after a century’, in
idem, In search of Florentine Civic Humanism. Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought (Princeton,
1988), II, 156–7.
17
See J. Le Goff, ‘Les Moyen Age de Michelet’, in idem, Pour un autre Moyen Age. Temps, travail et culture en
Occident: 18 essais (Paris, 1977), 19–45.
18
Michelet, Cours, I, 328–9.
 ‘Renaissance’ and ‘fossilization’: Michelet, Burckhardt, and Huizinga 357
19
fossilized, sclerotic civilization. Since the twelfth century, he claimed, the
period had been characterized by nothing but a lengthy death struggle.
Feudalism, monarchy, the Church, scholasticism, science: nothing had been
productive. Philosophy had become a ‘machine à penser’, religion ended in
‘machines à prier’. Roland Barthes characterized Michelet’s Middle Ages as ‘a
civilisation of copyists’: ‘The entire society was imprisoned by the first and
last word of the Middle Ages: Imitation’.20 The master himself made his views
known in a torrent of polemic and anti-clerical prose: the civilization of the
Middle Ages had become a bizarre, monstrous, artificial civilization, borne by
an ‘immense army of idiots’ in a ‘world of chatterers’.
Why, then, did the Middle Ages not come to an end earlier? Michelet
answered this question with a paradox: ‘In order to be killed, you must be
alive’.21 And life was precisely what he had taken away from the Middle Ages:
his Middle Ages were transformed into an epoch of lassitude, an era with-
out any desire for innovation and change. A century later, Lucien Febvre, in
the lectures at the Collège de France that he dedicated to Michelet and the
Renaissance in 1942–3, was to pronounce the verdict: ‘Michelet killed the
Middle Ages, murdered them’,22 in order to allow the Renaissance to live.
A quarter of a century before this sentence was pronounced, the image of
the fossilization of the Middle Ages had taken on its most elaborate form.23
Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) admired Michelet.24 The frame of reference
within which he worked, however, was not formed by Michelet’s Renaissance,
but by Die Kultur and to an even greater extent by the discussions that had
been held since the 1880s on Burckhardt’s conception of the Renaissance. In
these discussions Burckhardt’s conception of the Renaissance had become
extended. Historians and art historians such as Emile Gebhart, Henry Thode,
Louis Courajod, and Hippolyte Fierens-Gevaert had sought to show that the
Renaissance had begun earlier, for example, with Francis of Assisi, and had
also manifested itself outside Italy, particularly in the Old Dutch paintings
of artists such as the Van Eyck brothers. This marked the emergence, often
motivated by patriotic sentiment, of an image of a medieval proto-
Renaissance.25
19
Michelet, Renaissance, 51–111. The introduction was published separately under the title L’Agonie du
Moyen Age, introduction Cl. Mettra (Brussels, 1990).
20
R. Barthes, Michelet par lui-même (Paris, 1954), 50–1.
21
Michelet, Renaissance, 52.
22
L. Febvre, Michelet et la Renaissance (Paris, 1992), 225–35.
23
Cf. J. Tollebeek, ‘Middeleeuwen en Renaissance. Over de aantrekkingskracht van het moderne’, in
H. Beliën and G. J. van Setten (ed.), Geschiedschrijving in de twintigste eeuw. Discussie zonder eind (Amsterdam,
1991), 41–54 and J. Tollebeek, ‘De Middeleeuwen dromen. Huizinga, Herfsttij en de esthetiek van de
geschiedenis’, in idem, De ijkmeesters. Opstellen over de geschiedschrijving in Nederland en België (Amsterdam, 1994),
179–202.
24
See, for example, J. Huizinga, Briefwisseling, vol. 3: 1934–1945, ed. L. Hanssen, W.E. Krul and A. van der
Lem (Utrecht and Antwerp, 1991), 138–9, where the comparison with Ranke works in favour of Michelet.
25
For a summary of these discussions, see Haskell, History and its Images, 431–95 and W. E. Krul, ‘Realisme,
Renaissance en nationalisme: cultuurhistorische opvattingen over de Oudnederlandse schilderkunst tussen
1860 en 1920’, in B. Ridderbos and H. van Veen (ed.), ‘Om iets te weten van de oude meesters’. De Vlaamse
Primitieven – herontdekking, waardering en onderzoek (Nijmegen and Heerlen, 1995), 236–84.
358 Jo Tollebeek
Huizinga was initially inclined to endorse these claims. He had read Die
Kultur as early as around 1895, and admired it. But the major exhibition of
the ‘Flemish Primitives’ that was organized in Bruges in 1902 convinced him
that the Renaissance had begun earlier than Burckhardt’s work suggested,
and had actually started in the north.26 Just a few years later, ‘probably in
1907’, his image changed: the Late Middle Ages were not ‘a harbinger of what
was to come’, but ‘the dying off of what had gone’.27
This image became the core of the book which Huizinga was to publish
in 1919, when he had become professor at the University of Leiden, under
the title The Autumn of the Middle Ages (Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen).28 The
Autumn was a study of ‘forms of life and ideas in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries in France and the Low Countries’. The ‘Burgundian Age’ was not
described as an age of reform – constitutional reform, for example – nor
as ‘the advent of the Renaissance’, but as ‘the Medieval civilisation in its
final throes of life, like a tree with over-ripe fruits, entirely formed and
developed’.29 Huizinga painted ‘the shrivelling and fossilisation of a rich
civilisation’: fierce, passionate, driven by a ‘desire for a more beautiful life’,
but false and vain, with ‘bizarre and overcharged forms’ and a ‘worn-out
imagination’.30 The basic tenor of the book was sombre – Gerhard Ritter later
characterized it as ‘weltschmerzlich’31 – and recalled the atmosphere of the
decadent fin de siècle literature.
Thus the concept of ‘Renaissance’ came to be ranged against the con-
cept of ‘fossilization’. Michelet presented both concepts in a single book.
Burckhardt’s Kultur and Huizinga’s Autumn formed counterparts of each
other, focusing respectively on the powerful Italian urban culture of the
Renaissance and the lifeless courtly culture of the late Middle Ages north of
the Alps. Both historians had climbed the same mountain, but had started
from different sides.

26
On this exhibition, see L. Deam, ‘Flemish versus Netherlandish. A discourse of nationalism’, Renaissance
Quarterly, 51 (1998), 1–33.
27
J. Huizinga, ‘Mijn weg tot de historie’, in idem, Verzamelde werken (Haarlem, 1948), I, 38–9, where this
insight is presented as an epiphany. In 1906–7 Huizinga had devoted his lectures at the University of Groningen
to the ‘Culture of the Middle Ages, cradle of the Renaissance’. See A. van der Lem, Inventaris van het archief van
Johan Huizinga – Bibliografie 1897–1997 (Leiden, 1998), nos. 23, 25 I, 121 I and 125 VII.
28
For the creation of The Autumn, see W. Krul, ‘In the mirror of Van Eyck: Johan Huizinga’s Autumn
of the Middle Ages’, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 27 (1997), 353–84; E. Peters and
W. P. Simons, ‘The new Huizinga and the old Middle Ages’, Speculum, 74 (1999), 587–620; and the epilogue by
A. van der Lem to the most recent Dutch edition: J. Huizinga, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen. Studie over levens- en
gedachtenvormen der veertiende en vijftiende eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden (s.l., 1997), 386–99. A recent
English translation offers idem, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. R. J. Payton and U. Mammitzsch (Chicago,
1996); but see the criticism by W. Simons in Speculum, 72 (1997), 488–91. An older, abridged, and simplified
translation was published by F. Hopman as The Waning of the Middle Ages (London, 1924).
29
J. Huizinga, ‘Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen. Studie over levens- en gedachtenvormen der veertiende en
vijftiende eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden’, in: idem, Verzamelde werken (1949), III, 3.
30
Huizinga, ‘Herfsttij’, 390.
31
Cited in Chr. Strupp, Johan Huizinga. Geschichtswissenschaft als Kulturgeschichte (Göttingen, 2000), 144.
 ‘Renaissance’ and ‘fossilization’: Michelet, Burckhardt, and Huizinga 359
THE PROBLEM OF RENEWAL
The conceptual opposition of ‘Renaissance’ and ‘fossilization’ created
problems, however. The first problem was related to the dynamics of the
historical process. For how could renewal arise from a civilization which
was seen as fossilized? How could a vital culture be born from a lifeless
precursor? This was a case of a Münchhausen paradox, which in fact
manifested itself not only with regard to transition from the Middle Ages to
the Renaissance, but also with regard to the transition from the ancien régime
to the Modern Age.32 It appeared as if the notion of ‘historical fossilization’
implied that a ‘turning point’ in history could only be brought about by
external forces, ‘outside history’. But what did that idea of ‘outside history’
mean?
Burckhardt had already concerned himself with a similar problem in Die
Zeit Constantins des Großen, and he therefore knew its complexity.33 With
regard to the Renaissance, he judged that the new civilization had had traces
in its old, medieval, predecessor. After all, even in the Middle Ages there had
been periodic waves of renewal.34 In Der Cicerone, the argument was therefore
that the Renaissance had been ‘on the doorstep’ for a long time,35 and this
precisely in Italy, where for example feudalism had never developed strongly.
Moreover, Die Kultur was initially conceived as a Schlußbild of a cultural
history of the Middle Ages.36 But when the book had developed an inde-
pendent existence, little remained of the presumed continuity between the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In Die Kultur, the break between the two
was complete; how the new civilization had arisen – indeed, how it had been
able to arise – remained a puzzle for the reader.
The composition of the book implied, however, that this problem had
been left out of consideration. Burckhardt had not conceived Die Kultur as
a diachronic account, but as a synchronic analysis of a culture and of the
unity which had existed within that culture. He did not describe how the
Renaissance had arisen, but simply took the Renaissance as a given situation
at his point of departure. In the words of Federico Chabod, Die Kultur was ‘a
masterpiece from which the Renaissance emerged like a splendid f lower that
suddenly blooms in the middle of a desert’.37 And it was precisely for this
reason that the discussions were able to arise that were followed with so much
interest by Huizinga: what had been the points of contact between the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance?
32
See, for example, J. Tollebeek, ‘A Burke marked by Tocqueville. Taine’s periodization of French history’,
Storia della Storiografia, 34 (1998), 21–37.
33
See the analysis in L. Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt. A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago and
London, 2000), 264–82.
34
Cf. R. Klein, ‘La “Civilisation de la Renaissance” de J. Burckhardt aujourd’hui’, in idem, La forme et
l’intelligible. Ecrits sur la Renaissance et l’art moderne (Paris, 1970), 205–6 and Ganz, ‘Jacob Burckhardts Kultur der
Renaissance’, 48.
35
Burckhardt, Der Cicerone, I, 169.
36
W. Kaegi, Jacob Burckhardt. Eine Biographie (Basle, 1956), III, 648–50.
37
F. Chabod, ‘The concept of the Renaissance’, in idem, Machiavelli & the Renaissance (London, 1958), 157.
360 Jo Tollebeek
Michelet too saw the Renaissance as a total break with the ‘fossilized’
Middle Ages. But as he – in contrast to Burckhardt – did wish to give a dia-
chronic account, he had to find an answer to the question of how the new
civilization had been able to emerge from the lifeless world of ‘idiots and
chatterers’. This proved to be no easy task. Michelet identified the Renais-
sance with a revanche of Life and the free spirit. But this was really just a
reformulation of the question: how had that revanche been able to arise?
Michelet referred to the résistance which had also existed to the ‘fossilization’
in the Middle Ages, to Joachim of Fiore and to John Hus, to Abelard and Joan
of Arc; in other words, to all of those who had prepared the revanche.38 But he
was forced to admit that their efforts had been fruitless, precisely because
they were born within that which had to be broken through.39
In his lectures at the Collège de France, an inventive Michelet formulated
one ‘solution’ after another in order to escape from this problem and free the
Renaissance from the stranglehold of the Middle Ages. He tried self-
repudiation: mankind ‘had separated himself from his past, from himself’
in order to arrive at a new world. He tried the alter ego: Christianity, which
forced a slavish following, contained ‘another self’ which enabled freedom to
prevail. He also tried the creatio ex nihilo: ‘Born of God man was, like God, a
creator’, and ‘the modern world was his creation’.40
It was this latter idea which was picked up again in 1855. Michelet
reminded the readers of his book that, while the French Revolutionaries had
been able to borrow their ideas ready-made from the philosophes, the ‘revo-
lutionaries of the sixteenth century’ had had to start from scratch. This made
the Renaissance ‘the heroic design of an immense will’, and also explained
why it had startled itself and had progressed so slowly.41 At the same time,
however, Michelet – as Febvre has pointed out42 – also presented the Renais-
sance as the result of a shock, the shock which had arisen on the invasion of
Charles VIII in 1494, between the ‘leaden world’ of a France which mentally
still lived in the fourteenth century and the brilliant world of an already
fully sixteenth-century Italy. The creative force of Columbus, Copernicus, and
Luther – the heroes who, according to the author, lent the book its unity43 –
or the almost chance event of 1494: what had caused civilization to rise again
from death?
Michelet did not know, either. Ultimately he sought recourse to a romantic-
mystical belief in the fertility of death: ‘We believe that we die, but we do not
die: eternal renaissance!’, was how he ended his lecture series in 1840.44 In his
diary a year later he recorded that ‘in order to be fully himself, man must no

38
See P. Viallaneix, Michelet, les travaux et les jours 1798–1874 (Paris, 1998), 393.
39
Michelet, Renaissance, 74.
40
Michelet, Cours, I, 353.
41
Michelet, Renaissance, 54, 251–3.
42
Febvre, Michelet et la Renaissance, 175–9, 191, 197, 199.
43
J. Michelet, Correspondance générale, ed. L. Le Guillou (Paris, 1997), VII, 817.
44
Michelet, Cours, I, 411 (cf. also 366).
 ‘Renaissance’ and ‘fossilization’: Michelet, Burckhardt, and Huizinga 361
45
longer be himself, but must die, must undergo a metamorphosis’. This was
how the Renaissance had arisen: in a passage through death, in which life had
vanquished the fossilization. In the preface to his Renaissance, Michelet added
a historiographic credo which was a harbinger of what Nietzsche would write
twenty years later: history does not pay homage to ruins, but to the power of
deed and creation.46
And what about Huizinga? Writing almost three-quarters of a century after
Michelet, he was no longer able to share the latter’s virulent opinion about
the ‘barbaric’ Middle Ages. As a result, the problem of the transition from
the Middle Ages to the Renaissance was less pressing for him. And yet The
Autumn had also evoked an image of an ossified civilization, from which
it would appear difficult for a new civilization to arise. Like Burckhardt’s
Die Kultur, however, the book was designed as a synchronic study. The
emergence of the Renaissance was dealt with more explicitly elsewhere, in
lectures, in adresses, and above all in two essays that were written shortly after
the publication of The Autumn, in 1920: ‘The problem of the Renaissance’
and ‘Renaissance and realism’.47
Both essays showed that Huizinga’s relationship with Burckhardt was more
complex than some critics, including the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne,
had suspected. These critics had accused him of being led too much by Die
Kultur when writing The Autumn. Huizinga had answered that he did indeed
feel a great admiration for Burckhardt, but had also sought to free himself
from his inf luence.48
This inf luence related precisely to the relationship between the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance. Even at the time of The Autumn, Huizinga
had warned against drawing too sharp a line between them.49 In the two
Renaissance essays he elaborated this idea. He argued that the two basic
characteristics attributed to the Renaissance civilization by Burckhardt –
individualism and realism – could not easily be invoked as criteria for distin-
guishing Renaissance from medieval culture. But he also went a step further,
rebutting the view that the Renaissance was the harbinger of the Modern
Age. He stressed that the Renaissance was not ‘the dawn’ of the Enlighten-
ment (Michelet), not an ‘awakening’ (Burckhardt), not an ‘exuberant accept-
ance and dominance of life’ (the fin-de-siècle Renaissancism modelled on

45
Michelet, Journal, I, 360.
46
Michelet, Renaissance, 50; cf. Nietzsche’s Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben (1874).
47
Both essays appeared in English translation in J. Huizinga, Men and Ideas. History, the Middle Ages, the
Renaissance. Essays, trans. J. S. Holmes and H. van Marle (New York, 1959; republished Princeton, 1984),
243–87, 288–309. For an introduction, see W. E. Krul, ‘Johan Huizinga und das Problem der Renaissance’, in
J. Huizinga, Das Problem der Renaissance – Renaissance und Realismus, trans. W. Kaegi (Berlin, 1991), 7–15.
48
See the correspondence in Huizinga, Briefwisseling, vol. 1: 1894–1924 (1989), 233–4, 257, 271. In 1919 he
made a short note for himself: ‘He [Burckhardt] remains one of the deepest historical thinkers, and the Kultur
one of the best historical books. And yet the watchword must be: liberation from Burckhardt’s spell’
(Tollebeek, ‘De Middeleeuwen dromen’, 191). Cf. J. Huizinga, ‘Renaissance en realisme’, in idem, Verzamelde
werken (1949), IV, 276.
49
For example, Huizinga, ‘Herfsttij’, 3, 40–1, 389–90.
362 Jo Tollebeek
50
Nietzsche). The Renaissance, he argued, had been less modern, more
‘medieval’. He argued this to the distress – ‘et tu Brute’ – of André Jolles, the
friend and Renaissance-connoisseur who had guided Huizinga through Italy
in 1899.51 Together with Ernst Troeltsch, the Leiden professor now suspected
that the great division in Western civilization had not lain between the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but between the Renaissance and the
Modern Age.52 The Renaissance thus became part of a ‘long Middle Ages’,
beginning in the twelfth century – a century of creation – and ending in the
eighteenth.53
Huizinga had chosen a different path from Michelet for solving the
paradox of Münchhausen. He chose not the romantic-mystical reincarnation
theory, but adopted a new division into periods: the Renaissance was ‘out-
moded’, while the dawn of the new era – and thus also the problem – had
been postponed. For both historians, the ‘turning point’ acquired a utopian
character.

FABLES OF THE MODERN AGE

In addition to the problem of the historical dynamic, however, the
development of the dual concepts of ‘Renaissance’ and ‘fossilization’ led to a
second problem, related to the status of the concepts used. The notion of
‘fossilization’ betrayed the fact that Renaissance historiography was
concerned with more than a pure history of ideas; ideals were also at stake.
Michelet was concerned primarily with personal ideals. His first wife
Pauline Rousseau had died in 1839; in 1840 he had met Adèle Dumesnil, but
she too turned out to be terminally ill. The revanche of life over death which
he constructed in his lectures was thus also a personal revanche. ‘I have mixed
my life and my teaching’, he admitted at the end of his lecture series in 1841.54
He continued to visit Père-Lachaise. But when he penned his Renaissance
fifteen years later, while his second wife Athénaïs Mialaret dedicated herself
to the study of nature, he felt ‘refreshed, renewed by her every evening’,55 just
as the culture he described had been reborn. It was reborn in the meeting of
France and Italy – Michelet had seen each of his own trips to Italy as personal
rebirths, rescuing him from his state of exhaustion, nervousness, and depres-
sion. The plan of writing a history of the sixteenth century was in fact born in
1853 in the fishing village of Nervi near Genoa.56
50
J. Huizinga, ‘Het probleem der Renaissance’, in idem, Verzamelde werken, IV, 231, 247, 255.
51
Huizinga, Briefwisseling, I, 310–11. Huizinga was to travel to Italy for the second time in 1902.
52
For the relationship between Huizinga and Troeltsch, see Krul, ‘Huizinga und das Problem’, 13–14.
53
Cf. Peters and Simons, ‘The new Huizinga’, 603–4. For Huizinga and the twelfth century, see L. Nauta,
‘Huizinga’s Lente der Middeleeuwen. De plaats van de twaalfde-eeuwse renaissance in zijn werk’, Tijdschrift voor
Geschiedenis, 108 (1995), 3–23.
54
Michelet, Cours, I, 463. Cf. Viallaneix, Michelet, 218–21, 223–4, 231–2, 235.
55
Michelet, Journal, vol. 2: 1849–1860 (1962), 287. Cf. B. G. Smith, The Gender of History. Men, Women, and
Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA and London, 1998), 86–101.
56
See Viallaneix, Michelet, 379–95. For the Italian tour as a rebirth, see A. Mitzman, Michelet, Historian.
Rebirth and Romanticism in Nineteenth-century France (New Haven and London, 1990), 261–76; cf. idem, Michelet
 ‘Renaissance’ and ‘fossilization’: Michelet, Burckhardt, and Huizinga 363
Yet Michelet was interested in more than personal ideals alone. His
Renaissance concept was also a protest against the fossilization, mediocrity,
and corruption he believed he saw in his own era. At the time of his lectures,
his theme was the deathliness of the bourgeois regime of the July Monarchy;
in 1855 the focus was on the imperial politics and the power of the (Jesuit)
Church. Just before Renaissance was published, Michelet was working on Le
Banquet, the manifesto of his ‘humanitarian philosophy’.
Such (social and) cultural criticism also characterized Die Kultur and
The Autumn. Without doubt, Burckhardt and Huizinga also wrote ‘personal’
books. Burckhardt regarded a stay in Italy as ‘a necessary supplement to his
being’; like Michelet, he felt reborn every time he went there.57 Moreover, the
Renaissance culture itself was characterized by a Weltlichkeit, a worldliness,
which had intrigued him since he had lost his own faith and ceased his study
on theology.58 The shadow of death which Huizinga saw hanging over the
Burgundian culture ensued from the mood which pervaded him following
the death of his wife in 1914.59 But the cultural criticism dominated. How-
ever, the accent in Die Kultur appeared to lie on the remedy, in The Autumn on
the illness.
Die Kultur acquired its ‘diachronic depth’ not only from the continual
contrasting of the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, but also as a result of
the presence of the Modern Age in the book.60 It is known that Burckhardt
was not enamoured of the Modern Age.61 This at least applies for the older
Burckhardt, the author of the posthumously published Weltgeschichtliche
Betrachtungen (1905). But Burckhardt had distanced himself at a much earlier
age from the optimism that had characterized him as a student.62 Since the
1840s this ‘aristocratic liberal’ – and for a brief period also political publicist
– had lambasted modern democracy, materialism, the metropolis, and
many more aspects of modern society.63 As early as 1846, two years before

ou la subversion du passé. Quatre leçons au Collège de France (Paris, 1999), 129–30. Michelet stayed in Italy in 1830,
1838, 1853–4, and 1870–1; see Th. Scharten, Les voyages et séjours de Michelet en Italie. Amitiés italiennes (Paris,
1934); cf. also ‘Un document inédit. L’adieu de Michelet à l’Italie’, ed. P. Viallaneix, Revue de Littérature
comparée, 27 (1953), 257–62.
57
J. Burckhardt, Briefe, ed. M. Burckhardt (Basle, 1949), I, 82. Burckhardt’s first trip to Italy dates from
1837. See Kaegi, Burckhardt, I, 515–36.
58
See, for example, Burckhardt, Die Kultur, 316. The significance of religion and secularization for
Burckhardt’s historiography was recently emphasized by Th. A. Howard, Religion and the rise of historicism.
W.M.L. de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-century Historical Consciousness
(Cambridge, 2000).
59
The Autumn was therefore characterized as ‘a book of remembrance’ (Krul, ‘In the mirror’, 370–1).
60
Cf. Ganz, ‘Jacob Burckhardts Kultur der Renaissance’, 49–50.
61
See, for example, J. Wenzel, Jacob Burckhardt in der Krise seiner Zeit (Berlin, 1967); W. Hardtwig,
Geschichtsschreibung zwischen Alteuropa und moderner Welt. Jacob Burckhardt in seiner Zeit (Göttingen, 1974); J. Fest,
Wege zur Geschichte. Ueber Theodor Mommsen, Jacob Burckhardt und Golo Mann (Zurich, 1992), 71–111; and
F. Jaeger, Bürgerliche Modernisierungskrise und historische Sinnbildung. Kulturgeschichte bei Droysen, Burckhardt und
Max Weber (Göttingen, 1994).
62
See on this subject F. Gilbert, ‘Jacob Burckhardt’s student years’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 47 (1986),
249–74.
63
For Burckhardt as an ‘aristocratic liberal’, see A. S. Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism. The Social and Political
364 Jo Tollebeek
the revolutions of 1848, Italy became his alternative in terms of cultural
criticism.64 Burckhardt, in contrast to Michelet, represented a ‘right-wing
Renaissancism’.65
But things were not so simple. The Renaissance was presented in Die Kultur
as the beginning of the Modern Age. This idea was reinforced through the
use of family metaphors. It started with the famous letter which Burckhardt
sent to King Maximillian II of Bavaria in 1858, when he referred to the
Renaissance as ‘the mother and birthplace of modern man’.66 In Die Kultur
it was described as ‘a civilisation which was still having an impact as the
immediate mother of our civilisation’; the Italian Renaissance man was
greeted as ‘the first-born among the sons of present-day Europe’;67 in other
words, the start of modern civilization. But was this not the very civilization
which Burckhardt criticized and which ultimately was to ensnare his beloved
Italy in its grasp?
Burckhardt’s relationship with the Renaissance was thus ambiguous. It was
not merely an asylum which offered him protection against his own times.
Nor was it purely a ‘supplement to his being’, a culture where he could find
that which was so sorely lacking in his own civilization. On the contrary, it
was also the harbinger of what had come to full maturity in his own era. The
diagnosis that Burckhardt produced for this was focused on the irony that
had accompanied the realization of the Renaissance civilization. As Lionel
Gossman wrote, this irony lay in ‘the simultaneous development of the
modern individual and the modern state’, ‘of personal ambition and an enor-
mously heightened subjectivity, and of a completely objective, rational and
desacralised view of the world of nature and politics’. Precisely because of
this simultaneous development, the two cancelled each other out: modern
man had become the prisoner of a tyrannical political system, which in turn
lacked a traditional, religious, or social foundation.68 The Renaissance had
thus committed suicide, and the story of that suicide was a fable of the
Modern Age.69 This fable made it clear that there was no way back and that
the Renaissance civilization, far from providing a remedy for contemporary
ills, in fact formed the basis of them.
As a critic of contemporary ills, Huizinga was also to attain great fame in
the 1930s, and for the same reason would later be compared to Burckhardt.70
But he too had embarked upon this branch of his career at an early stage.71 As
Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville (New York and Oxford, 1992); as a political
publicist, see E. Dürr, Jacob Burckhardt als politischen Publizist (Zurich, 1957).
64
The significance of the trip to Italy in 1846 is stressed by Gossman, Basel, 223–6.
65
The term is taken from Fraser, The Victorians, 213.
66
Burckhardt, Briefe, (1961), IV, 23; on this letter, see Kaegi, Burckhardt, III, 662–5.
67
Burckhardt, Die Kultur, 1, 76.
68
Gossman, Basel, 284–7.
69
Cf. W. Kerrigan and G. Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore and London, 1989), 27–35.
70
H. R. Guggisberg, ‘Burckhardt und Huizinga – Zwei Historiker in der Krise ihrer Zeit’, in W. R. H. Koops,
E. H. Kossmann, and G. van der Plaat (eds), Johan Huizinga 1872–1972. Papers Delivered to the Johan Huizinga
Conference Groningen 11–15 December, 1972 (The Hague, 1973), 155–74.
71
The literature on Huizinga as a cultural critic is extensive; see, for example, L. Hanssen, ‘Versteende
 ‘Renaissance’ and ‘fossilization’: Michelet, Burckhardt, and Huizinga 365
a young Indologist he had criticized Buddhism because it had shrunk to a
complicated system of rules and rituals without any genuine links with the
society in which they had arisen.72 The First World War and the entry of the
USA into it led him to a study of modern American civilization. In 1918, a
year before the publication of The Autumn, he published the results of that
study.73 Once again the same criticism of the civilization was heard: modern
American culture was suffering from ‘mechanization’. But Huizinga also
arrived at an ironic conclusion, which recalled Burckhardt’s Renaissance
history. Every culture, he wrote, required organization, but that organization
constantly threatened to swamp the civilization it had made possible, and
thus to ‘petrify life’. It appeared that this process would be completed in the
contemporary era – just as, added Huizinga, had happened in the late Middle
Ages.74 His book on America made clear that The Autumn, too, contained a
fable of the Modern Age.
But had the Renaissance not demonstrated that there could be an
alternative to mechanization and fossilization? Huizinga’s periodization
prevented him from cherishing that hope. By defining the Renaissance as an
extension of the (late) Middle Ages, it too became the subject of cultural
criticism, just like Burgundian civilization. Students were taught that Italy
had given Europe refined forms and artistic models, but ‘no principles of
culture’. In an unpublished address from 1908 the verdict was even more
severe: the Renaissance had been an example of ‘over-civilization’, ‘the spirit-
ual hypertrophy of a few, an upper-ten: the refined tyrant, the condottiere,
the diplomat, the bel-esprit, the scholar’, ‘a small group of decadents’ without
any sense of responsibility.75 Renewal? In a speech on the resumption of his
lectures following the shocking events of the First World War, Huizinga
answered this question with another question: ‘Are not those strivings which
are most passionately directed towards renewal also the last manifestations of
decay?’76 This applied both for the ‘upper-ten’ of the Renaissance and for the
nineteenth-century ‘progress optimists’.
Yet Huizinga was not willing to go as far as Troeltsch: for Huizinga, the
Renaissance still possessed vital forces, just as he had also seen the whole-
bloemen en vervloeiende grenzen. Huizinga en de cultuurkritiek’, in idem, Huizinga en de troost van de
geschiedenis. Verbeelding en rede (Amsterdam, 1996), 317–51.
72
For Huizinga as an Indologist, see D. H. A. Kolff, ‘Huizinga’s proefschrift en de stemmingen van
Tachtig’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 104 (1989), 380–92.
73
For an English translation, see J. Huizinga, America. A Dutch Historian’s Vision from Afar and Near,
trans. H. Rowen (New York, 1972), 1–225. On Huizinga and America, see M. Kammen, ‘ “This, here and soon.”
Johan Huizinga’s esquisse of American culture’, in J. W. Schulte Nordholt and R. P. Swierenga (eds), A Bilateral
Bicentennial. Two Hundred Years of Dutch–American Relations, 1782–1982 (Amsterdam and New York, 1982),
199–226; W. E. Krul, ‘Moderne beschavingsgeschiedenis. Huizinga over Amerika’, in idem, Historicus tegen de
tijd. Opstellen over leven en werk van J. Huizinga (Groningen, 1990), 177–208 and the introduction by A. van der
Lem to J. Huizinga, Amerika dagboek 14 april –19 juni 1926 (Amsterdam and Antwerp, 1993), 7–23.
74
J. Huizinga, ‘Mensch en menigte in Amerika. Vier essays over moderne beschavingsgeschiedenis’, in
idem, Verzamelde werken (1950), V, 334–5.
75
Cited in A. van der Lem, Het Eeuwige verbeeld in een afgehaald bed. Huizinga en de Nederlandse beschaving
(Amsterdam, 1997), 84–6.
76
A. van der Lem, Johan Huizinga. Leven en werk in beelden & documenten (Amsterdam, 1993), 154–5.
366 Jo Tollebeek
some and the beautiful in modern American culture. However, he had a
much higher estimation of seventeenth-century Dutch civilization, with its
simplicity and ‘realness’, its moderation and tolerance. Few reserves applied
to this era, except for one: had it really existed? Huizinga called it ‘a miracle’
and placed it almost outside time.77 His image of the Dutch Golden Age
illustrates yet again the inaccessibility of the ideals which are the goals of
historical cultural criticism.

EPILOGUE
As a ‘turning point’, the Renaissance of Michelet, Burckhardt, and Huizinga
turned out to be caught in a broad web. That web was formed by the con-
ceptual counterparts which were evoked by the notion of the Renaissance
(‘fossilization’, but also ‘modernity’), by the implications of the creation of
these notions for the reconstruction of the historical dynamic, by personal
and culture-critical concerns. Time and again the concept shifted, acquired
new emphases, betrayed different fascinations. Michelet saw the Renais-
sance arising from ‘a Babel of lies’, but also from ‘a fertile nothing’.78
Burckhardt praised the Renaissance as ‘the discovery of the world and
of mankind’, but also recognized it in ‘the evening glow’ in which he felt he
was living.79 Huizinga drove the Renaissance out of the Middle Ages, before
placing it within a ‘long Middle Ages’.
The inventiveness of these historians raised the Renaissance to a mystical
level, in which the historical became mixed with the supra-historical. That
inventiveness exchanged reality for Utopia, and gave the past the colour of
the present by turning the Renaissance into a concept which referred to a
‘turning point’ for which they longed above all in their own period. ‘Your
Renaissance is a Proteus’, Huizinga accused the ‘dreamer’ Burckhardt.80 But
he too, as a ‘questioner’, could not do without the notion.
The Renaissances of Michelet, Burckhardt, and Huizinga demand admir-
ation, but also engender anxiety. Their ‘castles’ are so complex that con-
temporary researchers are afraid of becoming lost in them. Their medieval
vestibules and modern storeys, their corridors dug from a fear of catastrophe,
their intimate funeral parlours, their sun-drenched terraces, and bizarre cab-
inets form a labyrinth of meanings that are daunting for the researcher. Their
science has taught modern researchers to go to work in a more sober manner.
‘Renaissance’ and ‘fossilization’ have become concepts full of traps for them.

University of Leuven
77
See, for example, W. E. Krul, ‘Nederland’s beschaving’, in: Idem, Historicus tegen de tijd, 240–63;
J. Tollebeek, ‘Het gevoelige punt van Europa. Huizinga, Pirenne en de plaats van het vaderland’, in idem, De
ekster en de kooi. Nieuwe opstellen over de geschiedschrijving (Amsterdam, 1996), 225–47 and Van der Lem, Het
Eeuwige verbeeld.
78
Michelet, Renaissance, 97.
79
Cf. Kaegi, Burckhardt (1973), V, 639.
80
Huizinga, ‘Het probleem der Renaissance’, 232.