Power, justice and society: the shadows of the Middle Ages on the modern age

The Middle Ages described by Huizinga is a crepuscular age, which already contains the prodromes of the change then popularized under the name of the Renaissance. We should talk about this, rather than Dante’s political position

Not Dante but the vehemence of life is what links our days to the Middle Ages. We have heard plenty of debates about Dante’s presumed political position. Of the vehemence of life – an expression to which Johan Huizinga entitled the first chapter of his classic The autumn of the Middle Ages – instead we experience daily without flinching. “When the world was five centuries younger,” Huizinga began, “all instances of life had much more violent outward forms”. His term of comparison was the recently born twentieth century, which seemed to him to depart from the end of the Middle Ages above all because of the grace, the distance with which passions were expressed both in public and in private.