Paul Van Dyke

Background

Van Dyke was born on March 25, 1859, in Brooklyn, New York. He was the son of the Rev. Henry Jackson and Henrietta (Ashmead) van Dyke, and the brother of Henry van Dyke.

Education

Van Dyke was graduated from the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1881, and from the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1884. He studied at the University of Berlin during 1884-85.

Career

After his ordination in 1887 as a Presbyterian minister, Van Dyke spent ten years in religious work, as pastor at Geneva, New York (1887 - 89), and at Northampton, Massachusetts (1892 - 98), and as an instructor in church history at the Princeton Theological Seminary (1889 - 92). From 1898 until his retirement in 1928, he was a professor of modern history at Princeton University.

His theological training was reflected in the vigorous moral judgments which marked his teaching and his first books, The Age of the Renascence (1897), and Renascence Portraits (1905). After the completion of the latter work, he began an exhaustive search in the archives and libraries of Europe for material on the life of Catherine de Medicis. This task was interrupted from July 1917 to July 1919 by war work as secretary of the American University Union at Paris, where his sympathetic help revived many whose lives and hopes had been shattered.

He himself believed this work the most useful of his life, and in his letters from Paris, the conviction that the war was a moral crusade finds vehement expression. After the war he continued his interest in the American University Union, serving as director of the continental division at Paris from 1921 to 1923, and again during 1928-29.

Van Dyke's later biographical studies, Ignatius Loyola, the Founder of the Jesuits (1926), and George Washington, the Son of His Country, 1732-1775 (1931), were less important as scholarly works but more successful as portraits.

In 1928, he published The Story of France from Julius Cesar to Napoleon III, which was noteworthy for the vivid descriptions of cultural life in France during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He was twice Harvard lecturer at the provincial universities of France, and Louis Liard lecturer at the Sorbonne, Paris.

Van Dyke died at his summer home at Washington, Connecticut.

Achievements

• Van Dyke's most important work, Catherine de Medicis, immediately won international recognition as a definitive history of the religious wars in France. As a biography, the work was less successful, in part because of Van Dyke's unwillingness to impose his views on the reader and in part because, although all the elements of the portrait were assembled, the figure of Catherine never clearly emerged. Among his honorary degrees was that of Docteur es Lettres, granted by the University of Toulouse. He was an officer of the Legion of Honor.

Works

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  • Catherine de Medicis; Volume 2

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Catherine de Medicis; Volume 1

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • A Referendum for the Illustrations in the Garfield Edition of General Lew. Wallace's Novel Ben-Hur

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • book

Politics

In political and social life Van Dyke was a Jeffersonian Democrat, and his love both of his own country and of France was intimately connected with his faith in democracy.

Personality

Van Dyke's slight, delicate figure and gentle manner gave little indication of the vigor of his personality. Although the dogmatism of his earlier years gradually gave place to tolerance, he remained to the end inflexible in devotion to honor and duty.

Connections

Van Dyke was unmarried.

Father:

Henry Jackson van Dyke

Mother:

Henrietta (Ashmead) van Dyke