Just as the later medieval Church has been described by historians in terms of decline and decay, so northern European culture in the period from c. 1300 to c. 1500 has been seen as an autumnal conclusion to the Middle Ages, over-ripe and beginning to rot after the spring and high summer of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Such an interpretation owes much to the great Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga, whose Waning of the Middle Ages ( 1919) painted a pessimistic picture of a civilization in decline. The seasonal metaphor--of a cultural spring, summer, and autumn--has not been much pursued by later historians, and rightly so. Unitary interpretations inspired, as Huizinga's was, by the philosophy of Hegel no longer dominate the writing of cultural history. It is to such themes as patronage of the visual arts, lay literacy and bookcollecting, and the effects of changes in religious sentiment and sensibility that we must turn to characterize a 'culture' as rich and productive as this. Between 1200 and 1500 artistic and literary patronage by the laity, both noble and non-noble, played a fundamental part in producing the culture that Huizinga described but did not analyse.
A central theme of any study of northern European culture must be the rise and decline of Paris as a source and centre of artistic patronage. Under St Louis the building works undertaken by the king in the city and in the Île-de-France (such as the Sainte-Chapelle) brought masons, sculptors, and painters to work for the French court. In book production Paris came to be perhaps the most important city in northern Europe: its workshops produced great illuminators such as the Parisian Master Honoré, documented in French royal accounts, and his successor Jean Pucelle. St Louis's Bible (c. 1250) was a characteristic product of this Parisian school of manuscript painting, carried on with a somewhat higher degree of representational realism by later illuminators such as Master Honoré. Paris had a thriving book trade, regulated largely by the university and its demands. As late as 1344, Richard de Bury, bishop of Durham and lover of books, could still describe the city as a 'worldly
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