The realm of Prince Rupert

Abstract

A. Rupert Hall, Newton, his Friends and Foes and Science and Society: Historical Essays on the Relations of Science, Technology and Medicine . Aldershot: Variorum, 1993 and 1994; pp. xii + 330 and x + 324, £49.50 and £47.50. ISBN 0 86078 347 2 and 0 86078 400 2. All admirers of the work of Rupert Hall will be indebted to Variorum for collecting together thirty-two of his scholarly essays from widely scattered sources. These appear - retaining their original format and illustrations - in two stoutly-bound volumes, each provided with a useful index of names. Newton, his Friends and Foes provides a kind of pendant to Hall’s existing books on Newton, from his work on the Newton Correspondence and his 1962 edition (with Marie Boas Hall) of Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton , to his more recent biography and his studies of the Opticks and of the Newton-Leibniz controversy. In his ‘Autobiographical Introduction’, he interestingly chronicles the dearth of scholarly attention to Newton at the time when he first examined the Newton manuscripts in Cambridge University Library, while also briefly indicating the explosion of interest in the subject that has occurred since. Here, we are presented with various key studies of Newton’s intellectual evolution (some of them coauthored with Marie Boas Hall), and others devoted to his impact, not least in Europe. In addition, this volume includes essays on one of Newton’s mentors, Henry More (the subject of another recent book by Hall), and on his arch-enemy, Robert Hooke. Indeed, one article that it is particularly pleasing to see revived here is Hall’s publication of two lectures by Hooke in which his anti-Newtonian spleen was given full vent.