Pieter Geyl

Pieter Catharinus Arie Geyl (15 December 1887, Dordrecht – 31 December 1966, Utrecht) was a Dutch historian, well known for his studies in early modern Dutch history and in historiography.

History can reach no unchallengeable conclusions on so many-sided a character, on a life so dominated, so profoundly agitated, by the circumstances of the time. For that I bear history no grudge. To expect from history those final conclusions, which may perhaps be obtained in other disciplines, is, in my opinion, to misunderstand its nature.

Quotes

• History can reach no unchallengeable conclusions on so many-sided a character, on a life so dominated, so profoundly agitated, by the circumstances of the time. For that I bear history no grudge. To expect from history those final conclusions, which may perhaps be obtained in other disciplines, is, in my opinion, to misunderstand its nature.
  • Napoleon For and Against (1949), p. 15

• [I]t is the historian's task to deal with the individual in relation to the community. Furthermore his task is a very different one from that of the novelist. Though the historian cannot do without imagination, he remains tied to the event, to data, to testimonies, and he lacks the omniscience which enables the poet to plumb his characters to the most secret places of their hearts.
  • Napoleon For and Against (1949), p. 181

Quotes about Pieter Geyl

• The historian no less than the artist is a creator. Through his selection and interpretation he creates our awareness of the past; and through that awareness we attain a sharper consciousness of our own nature and that of the society to which we belong. It is his function, not to create useful myth, but to contribute to that knowledge of the world and of ourselves which is the only genuine guide to judgment and thus to action; not to make us clever for next time, as Burckhardt once said, but to make us wise for ever. It is only by the academic disciplines, by detailed scholarship, hard thinking and meticulous intellectual honesty that this can be done. That is the answer given with such noble clarity by Professor Geyl.
  • Michael Howard, 'An Academic's Apology', The New Statesman (14 July 1956), p. 50
  • Review of Debates with Historians and Use and Abuse of History by Pieter Geyl

• In October 1944, just as the Netherlands was being liberated from the Nazis, the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl completed one of the most original books of the many tens of thousands about Napoleon which have appeared over the past 215 years. Its originality lay not in Geyl's own view of Napoleon (though the book certainly made plain what he thought of him) but in its recounting of the views of others, and in the way it traced the different phases of Napoleon's reputation between 1815 and his own time.
  • Andrew Roberts, Napoleon the Great (2014), p. xxx

• His volume of essays is the most important survey of general historical problems that has appeared for many years... Geyl is one of the few living men whose writings make us feel that Western civilisation still exists.
  • A. J. P. Taylor, review of Debates with Historians in The Guardian, quoted in G. R. Elton, Reformation Europe, 1517—1559 (1963), p. 350

• Wisdom is shot through with a rich humanity... he represents the model towards which we ought to aspire.
  • A. J. P. Taylor, review of Encounters in History in The Observer, quoted in The Times (9 October 1963), p. 14