Assaying Robert BoyleThe Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest: Including Boyle's "Lost" Dialogue on the Transmutation of Metals. Lawrence M. Principe

Abstract

In a work of stunning scholarship, Lawrence Principe offers a significantly revisionist interpretation of one of the canonical figures of the Scientific Revolution, Robert Boyle. In place of the standard Boyle who championed mechanism by breaking from the earlier learning of the alchemists, Principe offers another Boyle, a man who spent decades carefully studying alchemical texts and patiently pursuing in his chemical laboratories the philosophers' stone and the manufacture of gold from baser elements. How have Boyle scholars, including Marie Boas Hall, Thomas Kuhn, George Sarton, Steven Shapin, and Simon Schaffer, managed to miss out on such a Boyle? How did Principe uncover this undetected side of Boyle? Much of the answer to the first question lies in the insistently narrow focus of earlier scholars on Boyle's activities in the 1660s, the early years of the Royal Society. Moreover, earlier scholars have shown a penchant for examining Boyle's printed works, supplementing these only with Thomas Birch's eighteenth-century, incomplete, and highly expurgated version of Boyle's correspondence. Principe, in contrast, comes to his task of rehabilitating our image of Boyle as an actively engaged alchemist armed with an astonishing array of archival and manuscript sources. Ile has spent years poring over the Boyle papers at the Royal Society, now catalogued and available on microfilm (Antonio Clericuzio and Michael Hunter are editing the complete surviving correspondence, and Hunter and Edward Davis are preparing a new edition of the complete works, the first since 1772). In a scholarly tour de force, Principe has pieced together a new text of Boyle's Transmutation of Metals, which he has patiently reconstructed from some twenty surviving fragments. This text, presented as an appendix to the book, provides irrefutable new evidence that Boyle did not reject alchemy, as earlier historians have claimed, but maintained traditional alchemical principles and actively pursued alchemical experiments over his lifetime. On the basis of careful study of the Boyle manuscripts, Principe argues convincingly that Boyle not only took careful reading notes on earlier alchemical authors but also recorded his own experimental trials on transmutation. Only a scholar of Herculean strength and Sisyphean patience would have dared to tackle the alchemical notes in the