Boyle Studies: Aspects of the Life and Thought of Robert Boyle (1627–91). Michael Hunter. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. xiv + 244 pp. $124.95 (Book Review)

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Yeo, Richard
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2016
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For almost three decades, Michael Hunter’s work has been a necessary starting point for students and scholars of Robert Boyle and other founding fellows of the Royal Society of London. His many publications, and his editions (with collaborators) of Boyle’s printed works and correspondence, have provided an intellectual framework and an invaluable set of resources. Boyle Studies brings together material published since 2004, plus two new chapters and another that first appeared in French. The nine chapters form a coherent set, in part because Hunter has inserted signposts and cross-references, linking discussions across the volume. In the introduction, he reflects on his own understanding of Boyle in relation to past and current scholarship, continuing to see Boyle as “a convoluted figure” (5) and preferring this to “the lifeless lay saint depicted in the traditional historiography” (131), also found in Thomas Birch’s mid-eighteenth-century account (3–4). While acknowledging the insights of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Hunter eschews the image of Boyle as the self-assured aristocratic gentleman

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Renaissance Quarterly

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69

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4

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© 2016 Cambridge University Press. This is the author-manuscript version of this paper. Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. Please refer to the journal's website for access to the definitive, published version.

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Art history, theory and criticism

Literary studies

Historical studies

Arts & Humanities

Medieval & Renaissance Studies

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Yeo, R, Boyle Studies: Aspects of the Life and Thought of Robert Boyle (1627–91). Michael Hunter. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. xiv + 244 pp. $124.95 (Book Review), Renaissance Quarterly, 2016, 69 (4), pp. 1473-1474

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