Abstract

This book addresses two related generalizations that persist in the history of seventeenth‐century chemistry, both of which are crucial to the canonical narrative of the scientific revolution. The first is that the experimental program of Robert Boyle led him to abandon the Aristotelian and Paracelsian chemical theories of his predecessors and adopt a reductionist, materialist matter theory from the French mechanical philosophers Pierre Gassendi and René Descartes, forever changing the nature of chemical theory and paving the way for the modernization of chemistry during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The second is that the theories of Gassendi and Descartes were unequivocally “mechanical” and reflect the reemergence and supervention of classical atomism over alchemical and vitalist ontologies. Both of these generalizations have been successfully challenged in the past fifteen years. The present book collects and explicates these findings, while focusing on Robert Boyle and the legacy of his matter theory for late seventeenth‐century European chemistry. In the end, Antonio Clericuzio shows that Cartesian mechanical philosophy did not have a decisive impact on the matter theory of the chemists who held onto chemical principles and qualities even as they adopted various forms of Boyle's corpuscular hypothesis.In an able historiographical overview, Clericuzio shows how Boyle was thrust into the mainstream of revolutionary science by Thomas Kuhn, Marie Boas, and A. R. Hall, who depended on an eighteenth‐century construction of Boyle that suited the needs of the experimentalism and materialism of Enlightenment science but hardly reflected the thinking of Boyle and his contemporaries, as is evident in the texts cited here. In fact, Boyle did not rigorously apply mechanical philosophy to his chemistry and medicine, as he did to his physics, and he fashioned his corpuscularist matter theory from the active seminal principles of the Paracelsians and Helmontians as well as the atoms of Epicurean theory and the minima naturalia of medieval Aristotelian alchemy. William Newman and Lawrence Principe have recently argued the importance of the medieval alchemists' materialism for seventeenth‐century chemistry, and Newman has credited J. B. Van Helmont and Daniel Sennert with forging medieval corpuscular minima into the corpuscles adopted by Boyle, but here Clericuzio argues that corpuscles were hardly evident in sixteenth‐century alchemy, that Van Helmont's theory was not truly corpuscular, and that Sennert's corpuscles still possessed Aristotelian forms. This matter awaits resolution.One of the strengths of this book is Clericuzio's treatment of the pre‐Boylean developments within chemical theory, documenting that corpuscularism did not emerge from the classical atomism of the French mechanists but evolved from various considerations of alchemical and Paracelsian theory, combined with Aristotelian natural philosophy. In the first place, the idea of semina, which Boyle explained as corpuscles endowed with generative power and specific developmental programming, was clearly present in chemical philosophy from Paracelsus and Petrus Severinus to Van Helmont, whose influence on Boyle and his contemporaries is now well established. Moreover, a materialized version of semina already existed in the medical theory of Girolamo Fracastoro, who adapted the idea from Lucretius. As well, semina were being corpuscularized and materialized in the early part of the century, as reflected in treatises by Nicholas Hill.One cannot expect a book of such wide‐ranging scholarship to reflect all of the recent literature in the field, but the author's failure to engage Barbara Beigun Kaplan's study of Boyle is unfortunate, both because her work speaks directly to the perspectives on Boyle that are treated here and because points on which their accounts differ need clarification. In sum, Clericuzio's book presents a much‐needed rectification of the entrenched Enlightenment view of Boyle and the development of corpuscular chemistry but is not the last word on Boyle's relationship to his predecessors' ideas on matter