The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) is known for his books on cultural history and essays on the philosophy of history.

Johan Huizinga was born on Dec. 7, 1872, in Groningen. Trained as a linguist and a specialist in Sanskrit at the universities of Groningen and Leipzig, he received his doctorate in 1897 and went on to become a high school teacher in Haarlem and a teacher of Indic studies in Amsterdam. His interests soon turned to the history of his own country, however, and in 1905 he published The Origins of Haarlem. The same year he was appointed professor at Groningen University; in 1915 he was named professor at Leiden University.

Like Swiss historian Jacob Christoph Burckhardt, Huizinga was a cultural conservative, strongly elitist, and in later years deeply despondent over the future of European civilization. Like Burckhardt, he took as his professional task the description of periods of cultural history. Whereas...