Journal of the History of Philosophy

Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.4 (2002) 543-545

Book Review

The Works of Robert Boyle

Robert Boyle. The Works of Robert Boyle. 14 vols. Edited by Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis. London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999, 2000. Cloth, $1,950.

This is the first edition of Boyle's oeuvre since that of Thomas Birch (1744, 1772), and is the first scholarly edition ever. It is a masterful achievement by Michael Hunter and Ted Davis, informed as it is by a total of approximately forty years of experience with the Boyle archive housed at the Royal Society of London. What began in 1980 as an attempt to catalogue the archive (a most daunting task, given the chaotic condition of the materials) has led to this new, and most welcome, edition—one that includes not only Boyle's published work, but also two volumes of previously unpublished archival material.

Despite its many defects, Birch's 1772 edition, in its reprint of edition of 1965 (Hildesheim: George Olms), has been popular with scholars living far from access to large collections of seventeenth-century works. The first thing to note about this new edition is that the editors have repaired the defects in Birch's edition. In selecting copy texts they examined carefully all editions of each work, and in all but one case found the first edition to be the most reliable (whereas Birch generally assumed that the last edition was the best). They have presented Boyle's works in the order in which they were originally published, making it much easier for scholars to develop a feel for the evolution of Boyle's thought. Boyle not infrequently published a number of tracts together; in these cases, Hunter and Davis have made sense of the hodge-podge collections printed in Birch (and in the original editions) by providing each tract with its own title page within the larger whole (and have further clarified the relationship of parts to the whole by the careful construction of the contents listings of each volume). Two of the most significant improvements are the attention paid to Latin editions of Boyle's works and the inclusion of important and previously unpublished archival materials, both of which I discuss below.

The main thing that sets this edition apart from Birch's, however, and its most important contribution to researchers, is its scholarly apparati. This begins with the General Introduction, which is an excellent introduction both to Boyle and to this edition of his works. Included in it are two sections on Boyle's intellectual evolution, a section on the original publication of Boyle's individual works (in which editors, booksellers, and printers are discussed), one on Latin editions of Boyle's works, and one on the reception of and subsequent collections of Boyle's works. There is also a section explaining the rationale for the present edition and editorial policies and practices, as well as an explanation why certain works sometimes attributed to Boyle (most notably "Reasons why a Protestant should not turn Papist") were omitted from this edition. In addition to the General Introduction, each volume contains introductory notes to the essays contained in that volume. For volumes 1-12, there is, for each essay, a section on its composition (including discussions of dating and tables of manuscript materials related to the essay). There is also a section on the publication of the essay (including information on when and where the essay has been published, up to and including recent appearances), as well as sections on the impact of [End Page 543] the essay under discussion, and a discussion of the text of the essay produced here. For volumes 13 and 14, which contain previously unpublished archival material, the introduction to the content of each volume is similar (although there are occasional variations related to differences in the material in these volumes). Throughout the edition, there are appendices to the introductory material, usually consisting of archival material that is obviously related to the topic at hand but which did not find its way into...