Johan Huizinga

(1872 - 1945)

Johan Huizinga was a Dutch historian internationally recognized for his 1919 work The Waning of the Middle Ages. After teaching history in Haarlem and lecturing in Indian literature at Amsterdam, he was professor of history first at Groningen and then at Leiden until 1942, when he was held as a hostage by the Nazis, remaining under open arrest until his death in 1945. Among his other well-known works is Homo Ludens, a 1938 study of the element of play in culture.