Robert Boyle (1627-1691): Scrupulosity and Science.(Book Review)

by Michael Hunter (Woodbridge: Boydell P., 2000; pp. 293. 50 [pounds sterling]).

Since 1990 an astonishing transformation has taken place in our knowledge of the central figure in late seventeenth-century British scientific life, Robert Boyle. Boyle's natural philosophical publications, his scientific method, the details of his life, even his iconography, all seemed to be well-worn topics in the burgeoning literature of the history of science by the end of the 1960s. Thanks to the work of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in the mid-1980s, Boyle's laboratory and authorial practice took on iconic status in the new canon of the sociology of knowledge. Stimulated in part by such refashioning, and with a clear eye on what it left unsaid, Michael …