Johan Huizinga

Huizinga argued in The Waning of the Middle Ages, published in 1919, that the fifteenth century was not the dawn of the Renaissance but the exhausted end of something else, all ceremony and violent feeling, and the book changed what cultural history was allowed to be about. Homo Ludens, twenty years later, made the case that play is not a by-product of culture but its precondition, and people who study games are still arguing with it. He taught at Groningen and then Leiden, where he served as rector. He was interned in 1942 after protesting at the treatment of Jewish colleagues, released to a village under watch, dying there in February 1945, months before the liberation.