Robert Boyle RecoveredThe Works of Robert Boyle. Michael Hunter , Edward B. Davis

Abstract

Robert Boyle (1627-1691) was one of the most prolific and influential natural philosophers of the second half of the seventeenth century. He wrote extensively on chemistry, the corpuscular philosophy, and theological topics. The Boyle industry has flourished during the past decade, largely as a consequence of the effort of Michael Hunter and his collaborators to make the large collection of Boyle manuscripts at the Royal Society accessible to scholars by producing a useful index to the archive and making microfilm copies of the manuscripts available around the world.' Just as the opening of the Portsmouth Collection in 1948 precipitated a deluge of scholarship on Newton during the 1960s and beyond, so Michael Hunter's labors have initiated a huge growth in Boyle studies. With the publication of this new edition of Boyle's Works, Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis provide historians with a rich scholarly resource for deepening and extending their study of this important figure in the history of science and early modem thought. Until the publication of the present edition, scholars have relied on Thomas Birch's Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, first published in 1744 and revised in 1772.2 Birch's edition contained all of Boyle's published works, on religion and theology as well as natural philosophy. Although it enabled scholars to have a standardized form of reference to Boyle's writings, it suffered from a number of serious flaws. Rather than reproducing Boyle's writings verbatim, Birch modernized them to reflect eighteenth-century