Book Review: To Justify the Ways of Boyle to Man: The Works of Robert Boyle,Robert Boyle (1627–91): Scrupulosity and Science

The theory of the link between birth-order and creativity adumbrated in Frank Sulloway's Born to rebel: Birth order, family dynamics, and creative lives (London, 1996) has nothing to say about children who, like Boyle, were fourteenth in the pecking-order: See, however, p. 101.

Rogers G.A.J. , “Boyle, Locke and reason”, in Yolton John W. (ed.), Philosophy, religion and science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Rochester, NY, 1990), 339–50.

Hunter Michael , Establishing the new science: The experience of the early Royal Society (Woodbridge, 1989). For a bold account of the creation of science and its place in modern ideologies, see Jacob Margaret C. , “Reflections on the ideological meaning of Western science from Boyle and Newton to the postmodernists”, History of science, xxxiii (1995), 333–57.

For the endowment of the Boyle Lectures, see Jacob Margaret C. , The Newtonians and the English revolution, 1689–1720 (Hassocks, 1976).

Kaplan Barbara Beigun , “Divulging of useful truths in physick”: The medical agenda of Robert Boyle (Baltimore, 1993).

Sargent Rose-Mary , The diffident naturalist: Robert Boyle and the philosophy of experiment (Chicago, 1995).

Shapin Steven Schaffer Simon , Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life (Princeton, NJ, 1985). See also Shapin S. , “Pump and circumstance: Robert Boyle's literary technology”, Social studies of science, xiv (1984), 481–520. Boyle's rhetorical strategies have subsequently attracted further attention: See for instance Wintroub Michael , “The looking glass of facts: Collecting, rhetoric and citing the self in the experimental natural philosophy of Robert Boyle”, History of science, xxxv (1997), 189–217.

See especially Jacob James , Robert Boyle and the English revolution: A study in social and intellectual change (New York, 1977); Webster Charles , The great instauration: Science, medicine and reform 1626–1660 (London, 1975). Hunter's quarrel with Jacob is assessed in Golinski Jan , “Robert Boyle's coat of many colours”, Studies in the history and philosophy of science, xxviii (1997), 209–17. The standard, if dated, life remains Maddison R. E. W. , The life of the honourable Robert Boyle, FRS (London, 1969).

The last confident attempt to set Boyle within the rise of modern chemistry was Marie Boas's Robert Boyle and seventeenth century chemistry (Cambridge, 1958). Boyle's alchemical interests, and especially his fascination with transmutation, have received a masterly monograph: Principe Lawrence , The aspiring adept: Robert Boyle and his alchemical quest (Princeton, 1998). See also Clericuzio A. , “A redefinition of Boyle's chemistry and corpuscular philosophy”, Annals of science, xlvii (1990), 561–89. Also valuable is Golinski J. V. , “Robert Boyle: Scepticism and authority in seventeenth-century chemical discourse”, in Benjamin A. E. Cantor G. N. Christie J. R. R. (eds), The figural and the literal: Problems of language in the history of science and philosophy, 1630–1800 (Manchester, 1987), 58–82.

A state of affairs noted by several of the contributors to Hunter Michael (ed.), Robert Boyle reconsidered (Cambridge, 1994).

Birch Thomas (ed.), The works of the honourable Robert Boyle (5 vols, London, 1744).

Hunter Michael , Robert Boyle (1627–91): Scrupulosity and science (Woodbridge, 2000).

See especially Shapin Steven , A social history of truth: Civility and science in seventeenth-century England (Chicago, 1994).

Hunter , Robert Boyle (ref. 12), 12.

For the construction of Boyle by biographers and hagiographers, see Hunter Michael , “Robert Boyle and the dilemma of biography in the age of the scientific revolution”, in Shortland Michael Yeo Richard (eds), Telling lives in science: Essays on scientific biography (Cambridge and New York, 1996), 115–38. Early lives of Boyle are reprinted in Hunter Michael (ed.), Robert Boyle by himself and his friends, with a fragment of William Wotton's lost life of Boyle (London, 1994).

Hunter , Robert Boyle (ref. 12), 224. For comparable criticisms of the shortcomings of ‘social constructivist’ approaches, see Wear Andrew , Knowledge and practice in English medicine 1550–1680 (Cambridge, 2000), 1f. As already noted, Hunter is coediting Boyle's correspondence. Having already written the entry for the New dictionary of national biography, he has also indicated his intention to undertake a full biographical study.

Hunter Michael , “Robert Boyle (1627–91): A suitable case for treatment?”, The British journal for the history of science, xxxii (1999), special issue: “Psychoanalysing Robert Boyle”, 261–76, p. 271. Hunter also speaks of getting at Boyle “as a person”: P. 265.

Harwood John T. (ed.), The early essays and ethics of Robert Boyle (Carbondale, 1991); Hunter Michael , “How Boyle became a scientist”, History of science, xxxiii (1995), 59–103.

Vol. xiii of the Works contains materials from the 1650s, prepared in a finished state but not published, which help to explain this shift. For the quotation, see Hunter , Robert Boyle (ref. 12), 25.

These were published in the The British journal for the history of science, xxxii (1999), special issue: “Psychoanalysing Robert Boyle”: Kahr Brett , “Robert Boyle: A Freudian perspective on an eminent scientist”, 277–84; Clay John , “Robert Boyle: A Jungian perspective”, 285–98; Figlio Karl , “Psychoanalysis and the scientific mind: Robert Boyle”, 299–314. Figlio's piece is largely exempt from the strictures in my text. Hunter himself contributed an introductory essay: “Robert Boyle (1627–91): A suitable case for treatment?”, 261–76; and Geoffrey Cantor offered a summing up: “Boyling over: A commentary on the preceding papers”, 315–24. The psycho-historians do not seem to take account of the fact that swaddling was a normal practice, or that many mothers died prematurely. Psychohistories of Newton have become common since Frank E. Manuel's A portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, MA, 1968).

Hunter is hesitant to apply terms to Boyle taken from psychopathology, being unwilling to go further than the idea of “dysfunctionalism”: See chap. 3.: “The conscience of Robert Boyle: Functionalism, ‘dysfunctionalism’, and the task of historical understanding”, in Boyle (ref. 12), 58–71.

Merton Robert K. , “Science, technology and society in seventeenth century England”, Osiris, iv (1938), 360–632.

Valuable here is Lawrence Christopher Shapin Steven (eds), Science incarnate — Historical embodiments of natural knowledge (Chicago and London, 1998), which adds the further dimension of the history of the body and its representations.