All Scholars

At Groningen Hofman-Peerklamp (hereafter Peerklamp) he was a student of Johannes Ruardi (1746-1815), who trained him in Latin composition. While at Haarlem, the recently (1726) editio princeps of the pre-Sophistic novel, The Ephesian Tale of Anthia and Hebrcomes, had engaged a number of Dutch scholars. Peerklamp’s learned edition made his name in Dutch classical world as a talented editor. When the Belgian Academy offered a prize for a compendium of Dutch Neo-Latin poets, Peerklamp, who wrote Neo-latin poetry throughout his life (collected posthumously), compiled his 1822 conspectus in a style reminiscent of Cornelius Nepos and Cicero. 

Once arrived in Leiden, he began to express an eccentric view of text editing that recalls the excesses of Richard Bentley (1662-1742). Shortly after succeeding poet and Hellenist Elias Annes Borger (1784-1820), he published Tacitus’ Agricola, which contains few but judicious corrections of the received text, but his later editions showed radical approach. In 1825 he and his colleagues John Bake (1787-1864), Jacob Geel (1789-1862), and the orientalist Hendrik Arent Hamaker (1825-31) founded the journal Bibliotheca Critica Nova to promote their views on the new approach to philology.

        Peerklamp was the author of what came to be known as “subjective editing.” While his deep and broad learning, and his palaeographic skills allowed him to master objective materials in editing a manuscript, he felt that if a reading did not match the high standards that he assumed for the great poets he studied, then he would rely on his own subjective judgement based on his perceptions of the author’s style and conjecture accordingly, whether or not there is manuscript evidence for his reading. His editions of Horace’s works found favor in the Netherlands but were controversial elsewhere in Europe. The texts of Horace and Virgil are among the most secure that we have from antiquity, but Peerklamp concluded according to his own lights that much of what we believe is Horatian or Virgilian is sub-standard and in need of radical emendation. Wilamowitz said that Peerklamp “remodeled Horace to fit his own ideas of logic.” While Sandys concedes Peerklamp’s deep learning and cites some who admired his work, he notes his “hypercritical spirit” (278) and cites a number of critics, for instance, H.H. Munro: “Some of [Peerklamp’s] comments such as those on Carm. iii 29, 5-12, are enough to make anyone blush who feels that a philologer should be something more than a pedant at his desk ignorant of men and things. Near the beginning of the Aeneid he rejects a passage closely imitated by Ovid.” (277) Sandys adds his own opinion that Peerklamp’s reconstruction of the Ars Poetica is “infelicitous and hardly one of his conjectures on the Satires can be accepted.” (278)

        Peerklamp was succeeded by Carel Gabriel Cobet (1813-89), who was known to edit texts subjectively on occasion.