Gerard Boate
Dutch philosopher

Gerard Boate (also Gérard de Boot, Bootius or Botius) (1604, Gorinchem – 1650, Dublin) was a Dutch physician, known for his Natural History of Ireland.
Life
Boate was born Gerrit/Gerard Boot, in Gorinchem, son of the knight Godfried de Boot (c.1570–1625) and of Christine van Loon. He entered the university of Leyden as a medical student and graduated there as doctor of medicine on 3 July 1628. His younger brother Arnold Boate (1606–1653) followed him to study medicine in Leiden. Both moved to London around 1630, where their family had settled earlier. Gerard became employed as physician to Charles I of England and Arnold as physician to the Earl of Leicester. In 1631 in London Gerard married Catharina (or Katherine) Menning (or Manning) with whom he had three children. The writer Dorothy Durie's first husband Arthur Moore died in April 1635 in Dublin. She moved with her children to London where she stayed with Gerald and Katherine Boate. She lost a lot of her wealth in Ireland and before she left for The Hague in 1642 she sold some other lands in Ireland to Katherine Boate.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Gerard Boate” is dutch philosopher. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Gerard, Boate and Dutch, not as a finished interpretation.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5549926. VIAF identifies the subject as 35276417. The Library of Congress control number is n85084721. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1604, 1650, 1570 and 1625.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gerard Boate” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.