2016 Reprint of 1924 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Huizinga had an aesthetic approach to history, where art and spectacle played an important part. This is his most famous work, wherein he here reinterpreted the Late Middle Ages as a period of pessimism and decadence rather than rebirth. The Waning of the Middle Ages is his masterpiece, a study of the forms of life of fifteenth-century France and Burgundy, based upon his critical reading of aesthetic and philological sources normally overlooked by the working historian. Huizinga attempted to do for the late medieval North what his acknowledged master, Jacob Burckhardt, had done for the Italian Renaissance.