Huizinga's use of contrasts was a deliberate choice. History could only be perceived coherently, he wrote, ‘by resolving events into a dramatic scheme’. A cultural phenomenon could only be truly comprehended ‘by defining it within an equilibrium of continuing oppositions’. Huizinga used oppositions of this kind for their highly ethical as much as for their highly dramatic content. ‘Dramatic – since people always perceive great tragic contrast in an inevitable lack of mutual understanding: the benightedness of the conservatives and the hubris of the innovators. Ethical – since people always share a respect for what is dead and beautiful, and a love of what is young and alive. Once an observer takes sides, the opposition is assigned a place as an episode in the cosmic struggle between light and dark, good and evil.’

These contrasts were more than a way of underpinning an argument or enlivening an image. Huizinga was convinced that they were embedded in the past reality itself. That was what made history so concrete, so vivid: the fact that it almost always manifested itself in terms of oppositions. ‘Clashes of arms, clashes of opinions, these are the constant themes of the historical narrative. History is essentially always epic or dramatic, however weak this potential may become.’ Whether fact or fiction, historical representations did not acquire clear contours until brought into a conscious play of opposites: ‘Athens does not become intelligible to us until it is contrasted with Sparta, we comprehend Rome through contrasts with Greece, Plato through Aristotle, Luther through Erasmus, Rembrandt through Rubens.’

THE WANING OF THE MIDDLE AGES

The best illustration of this mode of writing is The Waning of the Middle Ages. This is manifest from the very first sentences: ‘When the world was five centuries younger, all life events were far more sharply defined than now. The distance between suffering and joy, between calamity and happiness, seemed greater than it does to us; all human experience possessed that degree of immediacy and absoluteness that joy and suffering still have today in the mind of a child.’ In the opening pages of his book, Huizinga describes the periodic system of mediaeval passion in contrasts between rich and poor, warm and cold, light and dark, tranquil and rowdy, civic and rural, happy and hopeless, tender and cruel.