The Waning of the Middle Ages, also published as The Autumn of the Middle Ages, is a book by Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. Subtitled, 'A study of the forms of life, thought and art in France and the Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries', it was first published in 1919. In the work, Huizinga puts forth the theory that the romanticism and chivalric formality of the late medieval court was more a defence mechanism to the extreme brutality and violence of the day, rather than an expression of optimism. Whilst it remains the best-known work of the author, the book is not without criticism, with some feeling that Huizinga's theory rested too much on only one case, that of the Burgundian court.