Lambert Bidloo (30 August 1638 – 11 June 1724), of Amsterdam, was by religion, a Zonist Mennonite, by profession, an apothecary and botanist and by passion, a man of letters and translator.
His various learned works in Latin and Dutch deal with plants, with Mennonite religious issues and with different historical themes, contemporary, biblical and literary.
This he produced as a joint undertaking with the noted artist and art historian Arnold Houbraken who was then also launching The Great Theatre of Dutch Painters, (Amsterdam, 1718–21).
As writers, both wrote many poems, religious treatises, scientific and historical works and translations, and theatrical and musical pieces, including the first Dutch opera.
[3] He was not the only poet-pharmacist of his time: Joannes Antonides van der Goes, a noted disciple of the great poet Vondel was not only a fellow pharmacist but a Mennonite as well, along with Jan Brouwer.
[5] It recounts the upheavals of war on land and sea, including the flooding of the Dutch Water Line and the rescue of Amsterdam from the country's occupation by Louis XIV.
During the Munster Rebellion (1534–35), a splinter group staged a temporary social revolution which endangered their existence and were ostracised for their role in the Radical Reformation.
[12] Bidloo was a fervid Zonist from the beginning of the schism and wrote contentious pamphlets against the Lamists' more inclusive and tolerant views of the "Flemish" congregation: "Op te Lamm".
Among several projects the elderly Bidloo fulfilled his commitment to translate L'huomo di lettere (1645) of the Ferrarese Jesuit writer, Daniello Bartoli (1608-1685).
In his foreword Bidloo describes his introduction to Bartoli's Baroque bestseller years earlier at the Congress of Nijmegen (1677–78) by the papal nuncio of Innocent XI.
[21] After Lambert's death in 1724, Hendrik Bosch, his Amsterdam printer, together with his two daughters as publishers, issued a final work in three volumes on the resonant theme of the downfall of the Jewish people.