‘A miraculous process of pupations’ was how Burckhardt had described history. And that was how Huizinga had fashioned it, literally, with form as the trait d’union between mutable life and immutable human nature. Life existed in infinite variations, forms were limited in number, while the essence of man remained virtually constant. Somewhere in between the varicoloured variety of the day and the profound realization of eternity, between that mosaic of anecdotes and the timeless narrative, were the historical forms, which served as ‘binding agents’. That was the only way to approach human identity, the true content of history. It was ‘forms of life and thought’ that he presented in The Waning of the Middle Ages. ‘Coming close to the essential content that resided in these forms – will that ever be the subject of historical research?’

Huizinga joined solid form to changing history by drawing ‘lines’. ‘This presages the spirit of military France,’ he writes in The Waning of the Middle Ages, ‘that would later yield the figures of the musketeer, the grognard and the poilu.’ And further on: ‘Calendar miniatures record with pleasure the threadbare knees of the little reapers in the corn, paintings capture the rags of beggars receiving charity. This is the beginning of the line that leads through Rembrandt's etchings and Murillo's street urchins to the figures in Steinlen's street scenes.’

Huizinga's concern was not to trace a linear development, but to reveal a metamorphosis of forms. These forms remained utterly constant; one age passed them on to the next, and most were as old as antiquity. ‘But in Antiquity they had possessed an entirely different significance than in the Middle Ages. They constantly adapted to the central principle of the culture that applied them.’ The Renaissance did not alter this, nor did the Baroque. It was, he said, ‘a round dance of figures around the figure of the veiled goddess’.

MUTABILITY

While Huizinga's observations about the way our picture of history is formed are far from systematic, the limited variation of possible forms is central to his argument. ‘For the forms in which the ideal of love must necessarily cloak itself,’ he wrote in The Waning of the Middle Ages, ‘are few in number, for all time.’ The same applied to dreams. Huizinga saw the aristocratic life of the later Middle Ages as an attempt to play out a dream.