Given that Dutch culture has no classic authors, no Pléiade serving as its literary pantheon, no living collective memory nourished by a curriculum, it is remarkable how persistently Johan Huizinga continues to be read. By his own simple definition, ‘to be classic means still to be read’, Huizinga is one of the Netherlands’ few classic authors. Dutch culture does have a few classic books, although their numbers are dwindling, but in the sense of a classic author, Huizinga's only competition comes from writers such as Multatuli and Louis Couperus, Willem Elsschot and Willem Frederik Hermans.

Johan Huizinga, the most famous Dutch historian, certainly lends himself to comparison with writers more readily than with other historians. His work is far better read as a series of parables than as a historiographical oeuvre. In fact, those who read him as a historian will scarcely discover any cohesiveness in his work. In his bestknown books, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919), Erasmus (1924), In the Shadow of Tomorrow (1935), and Homo Ludens (1938), the authorial voice is that of a historian, a biographer, a cultural critic and an anthropologist, in that order. His work does possess cohesiveness – more so, perhaps, than in the case of any other historian – but it is to be found less in his subject-matter than in themes addressed in his writing. To date, Huizinga is the only Dutch author who has ever had a realistic chance of being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Only those who read him as a writer will appreciate the enduring value of his work.

With the aversion to heights that is indigenous to the Low Countries, his reputation was soon cropped, like Multatuli’s, for instance, to more manageable proportions. Immediately after his death, Jan Romein and others, even his friend C.T. van Valkenburg, denied that he had been a genius. Another friend, Gerrit Jan Heering, granted him ‘a stroke of genius’, but no more than that. And adepts of all the sub-disciplines into which history has branched since he was writing assure us that Huizinga has nothing more to teach us, and imply that on the contrary, his reputation is an obstacle blocking the path to greater and more anonymous progress in historiography.