Volume 4, Number 5 · April 8, 1965
Pieter Geyl
By Lawrence Stone
The Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century
by Pieter Geyl
Barnes and Noble, Vol. II, 399 pp., $8.50
History of the Low Countries: Episodes and Problems
by Pieter Geyl
Macmillan (London), 263 pp., £ 1.15
As an historian, Pieter Geyl has two claims to distinction. The first is as the author of a major reappraisal of Dutch history in the heroic period of the late sixteenth and seventeeth centuries, and the other is as a shrewd and pugnacious commentator on the methods of other historians, alive and dead. He is, for example, the most damaging, though not the most acidulated, critic of the metaphysical speculations dressed up as history put about by Arnold Toynbee, concluding with a wealth of supporting evidence and argument that 'the whole imposing work is a travesty of the scientific method.' The books under review are the last two of his three-volume history of the Netherlands (first published in Dutch thirty years ago and now fully translated into English), and a collection of essays on select topics of Dutch history over the past four hundred years, including, for reasons which will appear in a moment, an attack on the philosophical attitudes of Mr. E. H. Carr.
Review, 2037 words
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