ich had been drawn, unlike Holland, into the vortex of war,
it had the poignancy of a recall to the standards of reasonableness. It
will long maintain its place as a historical book and as a work of
literature.

The shorter book on Erasmus is a companion to this great work. It was
first published in 1924 and so belongs to the same best period of the
author. Its subject is the central intellectual figure of the next
generation after the period which Huizinga called the waning, or rather
the autumn, of the Middle Ages; but Erasmus was also, as will appear
from many of its pages, a man for whom he had a very special sympathy.
Something of what he wrote about Erasmus might also have been written
about himself, or at least about his own response to the transformation
of the world that he had known.

This is not the place for an analysis of that questioning and
illuminating response, nor for a considered estimate of Huizinga's work
as a whole; but there is room for a word about his last years. He was
recognized as one of the intellectual leaders of his country, and a
second marriage in 1937 brought back his private happiness; but the
shadows were darkening over the western world. From the time when
national socialism began to reveal itself in Germany, he took his stand
against it with perfect simplicity and calm. After the invasion of
Holland he addressed these memorable words to some of his colleagues:
'When it comes, as it soon will, to defending our University and the
freedom of science and learning in the Netherlands, we must be ready to
give everything for that: our possessions, our freedom, and even our
lives'. The Germans closed the University. For a time they held Johan
Huizinga, now an old man and in failing health, as a hostage; then they
banished him to open arrest in a remote parish in the eastern part of
the country. Even in these conditions he still wrote, and wrote well. In
the last winter of the war the liberating armies approached and he
suffered the hardships of the civilian population in a theatre of war;
but his spirit was unbroken. He died on 1 February 1945, a few weeks
before his country was set free.

G. N. CLARK

Oriel College, Oxford

April 1952

ERASMUS

_and the Age of Reformation_

CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH

1466-88

The Low Countries in the fifteenth century--The Burgundian
power--Connections with the German Empire and with France--The
northern