All Scholars

Peerlkamp came from a family of Classicists: his father and two brothers taught Classics at high school. The impoverished state of his family allowed him only two years at the University of Groningen, where Johannes Ruardi (1746-1815) was his most important teacher; he then became a teacher and rector at a gymnasium in his late teens. After about 20 year spent in Dutch high schools, he finally became a professor in Leiden in 1822. His collega proximus there was J. Bake (1787-1864), who mostly taught Greek and Classical Antiquities whereas Peerlkamp taught Latin. Together with Bake, as well as with H.A. Hamaker (1789-1835; professor of Oriental Studies) and J. Geel (1789-1862; head librarian of Leiden University) he founded the Bibliotheca critica nova, a periodical which primarily  focused on book reviews.

Peerlkamp’s main scholarly interest was Latin textual criticism. The best-known of his critical works is his edition, with commentary, of Horace’s Odes, Epodes and Carmen Saeculare (Peerlkamp 1834, second edition 1862), which excised no fewer than 644 of the the 3845 lines of Horace’s Odes. (Naber 1865, 35). Moreover, Peerlkamp postulated the existence of an original Carmen gnomicum, parts of which were mistakenly added to the original poems by ancient grammarians. The driving force behind these scholarly interventions was the idea that Horace, the optimus poeta Romanus (Peerlkamp 1834, V) would not have written a text as obscure as the one currently transmitted in the manuscripts. To support his project, Peerlkamp adduces the authority of the English scholar J. Markland (1693-1776), held in high esteem in those days, who had admitted to not being able the understand much of Horace’s poetry as the manuscript tradition presented it. 

Peerlkamp’s edition caused quite a scandal when it was first released, even outside the world of academia (Boot 1865, 9) and the first reactions were largely dismissive (see Riedel 1870, 36 for an overview of the early critical responses to the 1834 edition). The German editors Hermann, Lachmann and especially Meineke, however, conferred praise (Müller 1863, 172). Peerlkamp also published an edition, with commentary, of Virgil’s Aeneid (1843), which was based on classes he had taught in Leiden over the course of the previous decades. In it, he adopted the same radical approach to the text, heavily featuring excision and emendation. It earned him a visit from the Irish Vergilian critic J. Henry (1798-1876), who wrote: ‘I found a man so entirely engrossed by his own views as to have no room for those of any one else: one of the worst arguers and least rational men, not to be mad, whom I have ever met; in one word, exactly what one might a priori suppose the editor of Peerlkamp’s Virgil to be, a man wholly destitute, not merely of all literary taste, but all literary judgment.’ (Henry 1853, IIX). In the later stages of his career, when he had already retired from his Leiden chair because of health reasons, Peerlkamp temporarily gave up the Classics to make the shift to New Testament criticism, which he published anonymously (e.g. Peerlkamp 1855). In this, a continuation of his radical critical approach to classical texts, he found few followers (see Kamphuis 2018, 70-79). 

Peerlkamp’s scholarly interventions should be seen in the light of the general tendency towards Latin hypercriticism in the nineteenth century, which started with F.A. Wolf (1759-1824) and his students casting their doubts on various works by Cicero, continues with Peerlkamp’s Leiden collega proximus J. Bake (1787-1864) also proclaiming various Ciceronian works to be spurious, and culminates in the infamous 1869 Horace edition by Karl Lehrs (1802-1878), which wielded the obelus even more than Peerlkamp himself did. 

Peerlkamp could also be seen to be a late exponent of the eighteenth century, in that he continued the tradition of Classics professors writing works in Latin for various purposes, with the clear purpose of imitating and emulating Classical models. His Vitae aliquot excellentium Batavorum (1806), for instance, uses the model of Cornelius Nepos’ biographies for the purpose of teaching Dutch high school students about Dutch history. Another example is his De vita et moribus R. J. Schimmelpennincki, modelled after Tacitus’ Agricola. Peerlkamp’s Latin works (compiled in Peerlkamp 1879) at times consists of mere rhetorical bombast, but it can reach a surprising personal level as well, especially in his poetry. During the French occupation of the Netherlands, for example, using the pseudonym Aristogiton Frisius, he wrote Carmina quinque, dicata honori ac meritis Napoleontis Magni (1814), the title being sarcastic. In the second poem he bewails that fact that his brother is forced to be conscripted in Napoleon’s army: ‘Cruel Napoleon, what business do you have with our brother Jacob? / why is he forced to be a victim for a bad cause? / He is a boy who desires nothing but peace, and completely unfit for arms / What are you doing with an unwilling soldier? Send him home! / We are not able to sell someone else’s life to you for gold / As my father is poor and indigent—because of you!’. 

In his focus on writing Latin texts himself as opposed to merely studying Latin texts from Antiquity, then, Peerlkamp was more in line with the professores eloquentiae of the previous century than with his contemporaries who were making great strides in classical scholarship. An amusing anecdote (Müller 1863, 185) illustrates this: Peerlkamp was willing to acknowledge the merits of Lachmann’s groundbreaking 1850 commentary on Lucretius, but also he had a major point of criticism: the Latin in which it was written was not up to standards! Similarly, in his retelling (Müller 1863, 185) of the aforementioned meeting with James Henry, the author of arguably the most influential Aeneid commentary of the 19^th century (Aeneidea, 1873-78), Peerlkamp laid great weight on the fact that Henry’s conversational Latin was not very good, and in fact worse than that of Henry’s daughter, who had been present too.

Despite his idiosyncrasies, one still occasionally finds Peerlkamp’s name in later works of scholarship, and not just in derogatory terms. In his Horace, for instance, Fraenkel (1957, 289 n. 1) noted that "Peerlkamp was a wild critic but no fool."