Petrus Hofman Peerlkamp

Who was Petrus Hofman Peerlkamp?

Petrus Hofman Peerlkamp was a Dutch classical scholar and critic, descended from a family of French refugees named Perlechamp, was born at Groningen.

He was professor of ancient literature and universal history at Leiden from 1822 to 1849, when he resigned his post and retired to Hilversum, where he died on 27 March 1865.

He was the founder of the subjective method of textual criticism, which consisted in rejecting in a classical author whatever failed to come up to the standard of what that author, in the critics opinion, ought to have written. His ingenuity in this direction, in which he went much further than Bentley, was chiefly exercised on the Odes of Horace, and the Aeneid of Virgil.

He also edited the Ars poetica and Satires of Horace, the Agricola of Tacitus, the romance of Xenophon of Ephesus, and was the author of a history of the Latin poets of the Netherlands.

See L Müller, Gesch. der klassischen Philologie in den Niederlandes, and JE Sandys, Hist. of Class. Schol., ii. 276.