It was from Huizinga that I learned how to read, and Huizinga was the subject of my first publication; it was a foregone conclusion that I would some day write a book about him. The genesis of this particular book arose from a period in residence at Harvard University as Erasmus Professor in 2003. My duties there included lecturing on Huizinga, a task that gave me an opportunity to arrange my thoughts about him. When I returned to Leiden, I set about gathering the hours and days to write the book that I had had in mind for so many years.

In doing so, I had a formidable arsenal of literature at my disposal. Given the Netherlands’ customary lack of largesse in relation to its classical authors, Huizinga has little reason to complain. A handsome edition of his collected works was published soon after his death (9 vols., 1948-1953), and recently an equally handsome edition of his correspondence (3 vols., 1989-1991) has been added to this. Huizinga is still read and commented on today. In the Netherlands, the editors of this correspondence, Léon Hanssen, Wessel Krul, and Anton van der Lem, have provided the impetus for a modern approach to his work. The new bibliography published by Van der Lem (Inventaris van het archief van Johan Huizinga, Leiden 1998) proves that the work is still being translated. And new studies are still being written in other countries: not so long ago, Christoph Strupp published Johan Huizinga. Geschichtswissenschaft als Kulturgeschichte (2000).

These books list all the literature that has been published on Huizinga. I therefore judged it unnecessary to duplicate all that material in an extensive bibliography for this book. I have seen it all, and I have used it all. In that sense, there is nothing original about this book. At most, any claim to originality would come from my own reading of Huizinga. That is why this book bears the title Reading Huizinga, in that fine tradition in which Janet Malcolm wrote Reading Chekhov (2004), or in the equally fine tradition of William Trevor's Reading Turgenev.

Writing this book brought back many happy memories of discussions with my students, in Cambridge most notably with Edward Wouk and in Leiden with Theodor Dunkelgrün.