GEYL, Pieter Catharinus Arie

(1887–1966)

   Historian. Af ter his studies in the humanities at LeidenUniversity, Geyl wrote his doctoral thesis on the role of the Venetian envoy during the Dutch Republic (Christofforo Suriano, resident van de serenissime repub liek van Venetie in Den Haag, 1616–1623, 1913). In 1913, Geyl set tled in London as a correspondent of the daily Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant. In England, he became acquainted with historians such as George Norman Clark (1890–1979), George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876–1962), and John Ernest Neale (1890–1975). He was appointed to the chair of Dutch studies at London University in 1919. During the 1920s, Geyl became a champion of a kind of nationalism that in cluded not only the Dutch in the Netherlands but also the Flemish in Belgium and the Afrikaners in South Africa. This idea also influ enced his view of history as he expressed it in many publications, es pecially in his Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse stam [History of the Dutch-Speaking Peoples, rev. ed., three vols., 1948–1959]. In 1936, he was appointed professor of history at the University of Utrecht. Geyl won international fame not only through the English transla tions of his books on Dutch and general history (The Revolt of the Netherlands, 1555–1609, 1932; The Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century, 1609–1715, two vols., 1961–1964; Napoleon: For and Against, 1949) but also as a polemist, for example, with Arnold Toyn bee, From Ranke to Toynbee, 1952; Debates with Historians, 1955; Toynbee’s Answer, 1961; and Encounters in History, 1961.

   See also Historiography.