'When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness that joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child ...'
So begins Johan Huizinga's famous The Autumn of the Middle Ages (known in its original translation from the Dutch as The Waning of the Middle Ages). Although distanced from us by that 'half a thousand years' there is much in Huizinga's stunning portrait of a strange, assiduously studied, yet in so many ways still alien period, to evoke sometimes exciting, sometimes troubling, resonances in the modern imagination.
The world Huizinga sketches seems far from our own. 'There was less relief available for misfortune and for sickness [and these] came in a more fearful and more painful way. Sickness contrasted more strongly with health. The cutting cold and the dreaded darkness of winter were more concrete evils.
'Honour and wealth were enjoyed more fervently and greedily because they contrasted still more than now with lamentable poverty ... all things in life had about them something glitteringly and cruelly public. The lepers, shaking their rattles and holding processions, put their deformities on display ... The administration of justice, the sales of goods, weddings and funerals all announced themselves through processions, shouts, lamentations and music.'
For modern readers of Huizinga, however, there is a curious phenomenon that we might call, for want of greater precision, a kind of double vision. The first (Dutch) edition of The Waning of the Middle Ages appeared in 1919 so that the contrast between Huizinga's present and the world when it was 'half a thousand years younger' is already a century out of focus, so to speak, and while 21st century life has incomparably eclipsed medieval counterparts, there are aspects of the comparison that remain at least intriguing and, in some cases, enlightening.
There is much in modern metropolitan life that remains 'glitteringly and cruelly public': social media, for example, ensures the strident publicity that documents every move of individual lives for the multitudes who value this sort of display, and the corruption of social media by anonymous trolls provides a species of cruelty unimagined even by people half a thousand years ago who were particularly adept at cruelty and torture.
There are no lepers parading