ABSTRACT
The Robert Boyle archive comprises the Boyle Papers – forty-six uniformly bound volumes of miscellaneous papers; the Boyle Letters – seven volumes of correspondence bound in guardbooks; and thirty-one volumes of notebooks and other manuscripts. Housed at the Royal Society in London since 1769, this represents the principal archival resource for the study of Robert Boyle, one of the seminal figures of the Scientific Revolution. Boyle was the prime advocate of the blend of systematic inductivism and a commitment to a mechanical view of the workings of the world which is rightly seen as characterising the early Royal Society. His career as an author began in the 1640s, when he compiled a number of longer or shorter writings on religious and moral issues, which have been published in full. In the 1670s, Boyle publish works on a range of topics, including treatises developing the themes of his experimental work in the 1660s and others of a more speculative nature.
