Robert Boyle (1627-91) was the most influential British scientist of the late seventeenth century. This book provides materials for understanding the "Boyle Papers". It includes such components of the Papers as 'workdiaries' and his projected Paralipomena, and talks about his key work " A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature".
The papers, letters and ancillary manuscripts of the influential scientist, Robert Boyle (1627-91) have been at the Royal Society since 1769"a catalogue of them first published in 1992. This volume presents that catalogue in completely revised form, updated to do justice to the extensive use made of the archive in the definitive editions of Boyle's Works and Correspondence published between 1999 and 2001. The book also includes studies of the history of the archive and its components, in which significant conclusions are drawn about the development of Boyle's ideas. This book will be indispensable to anyone with a serious interest in Boyle.
'The Boyle Papers is an indispensable work for anyone interested in Robert Boyle, early experimentation, or the history of the Royal Society. By making this large, complicated set of seventeenth-century documents more accessible, Hunter performed a huge service to future scholarship. In compiling this authoritative and easy-to-use volume, Hunter has ensured that others will benefit from decades of this own hard work with these materials. At last there are clear paths through the labyrinth of the Boyle papers for other to follow.' Renaissance Quarterly 'The volume also contains a revised catalogue of the Boyle Papers, which completely supersedes the catalogue published in 1992... But the volume is much more than a descriptive account of and navigational tool for one of the richest scientific troves to come down to us from the early modern period. For The Boyle Papers includes a set of studies of the contents of the archive that together furnish us with an exemplary model of how scholars can quarry a mass of over twenty thousand leaves in order to glean new and important insights into the intellectual development of a leading scientist and his methods of work... In all, the Boyle papers is an important and timely publication... One hopes that other substantial early modern archives will soon be subjected to the same level of expert scholarly analysis.' Isis 'Scholarship on Boyle's life and work has flourished in recent years, owing in large part to Michael Hunter's publications... Just as the title implies, this volume contains the necessary material for a full understanding of the Boyle archive and provides scholars with an invaluable resource on this towering figure in the history of science and early modern thought.' Chemical Heritage 'Hunter's new catalogue of the Boyle papers will certainly be appreciated amongst Boyle specialists and 17th century scholars interested in the organisation of archival material from this period.' Metascience
