《中世纪的秋天》研究14世纪和15世纪的欧洲文化史，以北欧的法国和与荷兰文化为重点；描绘欧洲基督教文化在古典文化、人文主义中的自我更新。这段时间的欧洲社会风云激荡，十字军东征尚未收场 神秘主义蛊惑，人文主义萌芽，文艺复兴滥觞，宗教改革酝酿，这是一个历史大变动的时期。 本书重点展示骑士精神、宗教生活、爱情与色情、死亡的恐惧、文学与艺术；重中之重是文学与艺术的赏析、比较、评述；亮点有多彩的生活画卷、璀璨的群星、传世的作品和死亡的幻象。 本书将论辩置入事实的陈述和作品的分析中，读者可以鉴赏到40余幅图和数十部诗文著作，了解到那并不“黑暗”的中世纪末期的文明。作者的结论是：中世纪和文艺复兴并非黑白分明的两个时期，文艺复兴在中世纪中萌芽，中世纪孕育了古典主义、人文主义和文艺复兴；北欧的文艺复兴有别于南欧即意大利的文艺复兴。

本书从游戏的角度阐述了游戏与人的文化进化的相关性。约翰·赫伊津哈认为，游戏作为文化的本质和意义对现代文明有着重要的价值。人只有在游戏中才最自由、最本真、最具有创造力，游戏是一个阳光灿烂的世界。

The Autumn of the Middle Ages is Johan Huizinga’s classic portrait of life, thought, and art in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France and the Netherlands. Few who have read this book in English realize that The Waning of the Middle Ages, the only previous translation, is vastly different from the original Dutch, and incompatible will all other European-language translations. For Huizinga, the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century marked not the birth of a dramatically new era in history—the Renaissance—but the fullest, ripest phase of medieval life and thought. However, his work was criticized both at home and in Europe for being "old-fashioned" and "too literary" when The Waning of the Middle Ages was first published in 1919. In the 1924 translation, Fritz Hopman adapted, reduced and altered the Dutch edition—softening Huizinga’s passionate arguments, dulling his nuances, and eliminating theoretical passages. He dropped many passages Huizinga had quoted in their original old French. Additionally, chapters were rearranged, all references were dropped, and mistranslations were introduced. This translation corrects such errors, recreating the second Dutch edition which represents Huizinga’s thinking at its most important stage. Everything that was dropped or rearranged has been restored. Prose quotations appear in French, with translations preprinted at the bottom of the page, mistranslations have been corrected.