Johan Huizinga was reserved by temperament. ‘In a scholar, so much of his individual personality is left unspoken,’ he wrote of his teacher, the orientalist Hendrik Kern. He might have been describing himself. But he was also passionate. This passion could easily be concealed beneath the mantle of learning. Even so, the essence of his life, the lion's share of which was spent in a study, was embedded in that passion, in the fundamental contradictions of that life and the form in which he kept them in check.

The first and perhaps most important of those contradictions relates to the place where Huizinga was born. There is no other writer in Dutch literature, and certainly no historian, whose thinking is so dominated by a sense of place. Mediaeval serfs are sometimes described, in a wonderfully vivid phrase, as glaeba adstricti, chained to the land. This image applies both to the young boy known as ‘Han’ and the older Huizinga. His view of reality and the world was determined in the first place by Groningen and the surrounding region – the Ommelanden. That opposition between city and land also raises wider contrasts, such as old versus new, and centre versus periphery. From a still broader perspective, the essential subject of his work, the contrast between permanence and mutability, might well be traced to that initial local opposition.

Huizinga's family came from the Ommelanden. When the children played in their grandfather's house with the cousins from Friesland, local pride would frequently spark heated exchanges. He and his brother felt a hearty contempt whenever they heard their guests’ dialectal jou and jimme for ‘you’. Still, it did not escape the boys’ attention that these cousins felt Frisian ‘in a higher sense than we felt ourselves to be Groningers … I was probably not yet aware that my own name was of proud old Frisian stock, and even if I did know, it had not yet become clear to me that my provincial sense of Groningen identity was a recent product of a long and complex political development, in which an original local character had been submerged and lost, whereas in every Frisian boy, the remains endured of a primeval tribal consciousness.’