The middle ages: neither the best of times nor the worst of times. Such is the predominant insight of cultural historian Johan Huizinga’s fascinating examination of late medieval society. In the waning of the middle ages, Huizinga paints a portrait of the conventions and customs of life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as they reflect an autumnal waning herfsttij of the middle ages’ ideals. Considering theology and mysticism, politics and statesmanship, poetry and painting, marriage and love, Huizinga presents this period in France and the Netherlands as a death of an age, born of intellectual and cultural exhaustion, rather than the dawn of the renaissance. In this light, the end of the middle ages becomes apparent as the logical conclusion of the old, rather than the genesis of the new.