Johannes Gerhardus Rijk Acquoy was born in Amsterdam on 3 January 1829, the son of Jacobus Acquoy, a self-taught school headmaster and
independent scholar, and his wife Maria van den Berg. In 1857, he graduated with his doctorate of philosophy in Leiden. In the 1880s and 1890s, he was a professor of Church History, which Acquoy preferred to call "History of Christianity" at
Leiden University. While teaching at the University of Leiden, Acquoy held weekly , exclusive small lectures, in which he taught source criticism and sought to instruct his students in character traits such as truthfulness, in order to train them to be future church historians. Some of his students went on to scholarly work, including , who later took over Acquoy's position as Chair of the History of Church and Dogma at the University of Leiden. Acquoy died in Leiden on 15 December 1896 at the age of 67. == Selected works ==