Hermannus Angelkot

Born in Amsterdam and baptized on February 6, 1688, Hermannus (or Hermanus) Angelkot Jr. was known both as a pharmacist and as a writer of poems and plays. Sources note that his father also worked as a pharmacist and playwright, and the two are sometimes mixed up in later references.

What stands out about Angelkot is that he belonged to a world where practical professions and literary ambitions often overlapped. Rather than being remembered as a major canon figure, he survives as one of those lesser-known authors whose work helps fill in the texture of Dutch cultural life in the early 1700s.

He died in 1727. Because surviving information about him is limited and sometimes tangled with details about his father, the outline of his life remains a little uncertain, which makes the confirmed facts all the more valuable.