Reading by proxy: The case of Robert Boyle (1627–91)

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Acknowledgments

The original research for this article, as also for Boyle's Books (see n. 56), was carried out with the help of a grant from the British Academy. Further relevant research was done while Iordan Avramov was a visiting scholar at the Warburg Institute and holder of a Royal Society Short Term Incoming Grant in 2006. We are grateful to the institutions involved, as also to Elizabethanne Boran for making possible the oral delivery of the paper of which this article is a revised version at the Boyle symposium at the Edward Worth Library in December 2011.

Notes

1 Hunter, Robert Boyle by Himself, 8–9; Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science, 35 and passim. For a further commentary see Johns, Nature of the Book, 380–384.

2 Hunter, “How Boyle Became a Scientist.” See further his article in this volume.

3 Boyle, Works, vol. 2, 33–34.

4 Hunter, Robert Boyle (1627–91), 144ff., and Anstey and Hunter, “Robert Boyle's ‘Designe’,” 105–106. See further the discussion in Knight, “Organizing Natural Knowledge,” 244ff.

5 For the original preface addressed to Lady Ranelagh and dating from the 1660s, of which all but this paragraph was abandoned, see Boyle, Works, vol. 8, xxi, xxvi–xxviii.

6 Ibid., vol. 8, 242.

7 Ibid., vol. 4, 217–219. On Boyle's use of travel books in Cold see Shapin, Social History of Truth, 247ff.

8 Boyle, Works, vol. 5, 159. It should be noted here that in some of Boyle's publications no books are cited at all, for example some of the short pieces published in Philosophical Transactions: see, for instance, the three texts in Boyle, Works, vol. 5, 512–526, on a way of preserving chicken embryos, a description of a new kind of barometer, and an account of a “New Frigorifick Experiment.” On the other hand, when Boyle got involved in detailed polemics against his critics, Hobbes, Linus, or Henry More, he was inevitably drawn into quoting heavily from their works, but this was a different story. The structure of his responses to these authors was simple: a quotation from his adversary was followed by Boyle's words of correction or refutation, and then another quotation would be given, again followed by Boyle's reply, and so on. This was a monologue of citations, as it were, which was in stark contrast with the chorus of voices he amassed in Colours and Cold.

9 Boyle, Works, vol. 12, 211.

10 Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 1, 189.

11 Boyle, Works, vol. 3, 334. The date is deduced from the fact that the episode must have followed the damage to his eyes but preceded Harvey's death in 1657.

12 Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 1, 188–189.

13 Boyle, Works, vol. 1, 145; vol. 11, 169. On Boyle's use of amanuenses, see Hunter et al., Boyle Papers, 2, 46ff.

14 Boyle, Works, vol. 13, 310–311.

15 Ibid., vol. 6, 439n. On Boyle and mathematics see Shapin, “Robert Boyle and Mathematics.”

16 See above, n. 13. For Boyle's use of laboratory assistants see Shapin, Social History of Truth, ch. 8.

17 Boyle, Works, vol. 4, 147.

18 Ibid., vol. 9, 125–126.

19 See Hunter, Robert Boyle by Himself, 88.

20 For Bacon, see Beal, “Notions in Garrison,” 139; for Erasmus, and for the practice more generally, see Blair, Too Much to Know, 102ff. On the history of reading see the influential studies of Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’,” and Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, together with such recent books as Hackel, Reading Material; Sherman, Used Books; and Cambers, Godly Reading, which conveniently survey the relevant literature.

21 See www.livesandletters.ac.uk/wd/index.html. For a commentary see Hunter et al., Boyle Papers, ch. 3.

22 Boyle Papers 8, fols. 64v and 65ff., passim [hereafter BP]. On the way in which this document relates to the change in Boyle's preoccupations as referred to in the text, see Boyle, Works, vol. 1, xxxiv–xxxvii, and Hunter, Between God and Science, 171ff.

23 Insofar as Boyle Workdiary 22 [hereafter WD] occasionally records oral testimonies amongst the book extracts, for instance WD 22–27 for the testimony of one “Dr A.” who reported a bitter taste after consuming butter and beer, or the interview with Henry Stubbe in WD 22–30 to 34, it is possible that this was due to an error on the part of Boyle's amanuensis as to where the data should be recorded.

24 The most significant such amanuenses were “hand E” and “hand F.” For further information, see the introductory notes to WD 22 and Hunter et al., Boyle Papers, 54–55.

25 See WD 22–48 (Aldrovandi); WD 22–160, 161 (Galileo); WD 22–100 (Kircher); WD 22–50, 51, 53, etc. (Mersenne).

26 WD 22–60 (Paré); WD 22–61 (Zacuto).

27 WD 22–9 to 15 (Walton); WD 22–173, 174 (Sinclair).

28 WD 22–123.

29 WD 22–184.

30 For example, Moretus, Tractatus physico-mathematicus, is mentioned just once (WD 22–108), while Barlow, Magnetical Advertisements, gets a generous series of cited passages, WD 22–63 to 68.

31 See, for instance, BP 24, 347, 348 and WD 22–74a, 75a, 76a (extracts from Entzel); BP 24, pp. 347, 350–351 and WD 22–77 (excerpts from Fabricius); BP 24, 347, 348, 349 and WD 22–73b (Kentmann). The amanuensis represented in BP 24 is hand E.

32 BP 39, fols. 1–48, 53–75, 78–94. For Bacon and Greg see Hunter et al., Boyle Papers, 47–49.

33 Boyle, Works, vol. 14, 342, 353. The latter list also has an entry, “Transcripts out of Printed Books”; see also the similar entries in the list of papers dated 22 July 1688 in ibid., 347.

34 See our piecemeal references hereinafter. It is perhaps worth noting here that by “reading notes” we mean self-conscious compilations of extracts from books in the hands of Boyle's known amanuenses or associates. We have neglected a few items relating to non-scientific topics, e.g. BP 37, fols 209–214 (Hunter et al., Boyle Papers, 467). We have also ignored such texts as the “Geneva notebook,” Royal Society MS 44 (see Principe, “Newly Discovered Boyle Documents,” and Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science, 53–6), the extracts from French romances, Parthenissa, etc., in the early workdiaries, and the copies of material submitted to the Royal Society in BP 20. It is also important to point out that we have not dealt with documents in the Boyle Papers which comprise copies of or extracts from books, often in unfamiliar hands, the status of which and their exact relationship with Boyle is unclear: for examples, see below, n. 73 and appendix. These are fully itemised in Hunter et al., Boyle Papers, 291ff., passim.

35 BP 39, fol. 85v; BP 35, fols 182–183.

36 BP 39, fols 1–48 (including two cover sheets).

37 BP 24, fols 347–354.

38 WD 22–59, 60 and 61.

39 For instance, extracts from Scaliger's Exotericarum exercitationum Liber quintus decimus appear as WD 22–23, 36 and 106.

40 WD 22–41 to 47.

41 Boyle, Works, vol. 2, 422.

42 Ibid., vol. 4, 111. This quotation, from Colours, relates to repeating the experiments of others; on returning to his own old experiments so that they might “be confirmed, illustrated, or improved, by being reiterated” see the preface to Spring, First Continuation (1669), in Boyle, Works, vol. 6, 30.

43 For instance, various reference are given to Linschoten's Histoire de la navigation de Jean Linscot Holandois et de son voyage des Indes Orientales (1619), while fol. 14 refers to Hawkins' The Observations of Sir Richard Hawkins in his voyage into the South Sea.

44 On a more general level Boyle is, of course, just one more example of a compiler of notes who discovered that his notes needed more textual management. For a detailed analysis on such note-taking in the early modern context see Blair, Too Much to Know, 62ff.

45 BP 35, fols 182–183.

46 WD 22–70a to 73a; quotation with the French term left intact is WD 22–72a (it is perhaps worth noting that the word is altered in composition, as if the amanuensis was uncertain about it).

47 Boyle, Works, vol. 6, 204.

48 See BP 24, 347ff.

49 WD 22–85 to 98.

50 See WD 22–43, 45, 46 and passim. In the case of Workdiary 22 it has been suggested that the endorsements may have followed the number code in “The Order of My Severall Treatises,” but the evidence is inconclusive: see Knight, “Organizing Natural Knowledge,” 115ff.

51 See BP 39, fol. 94.

52 See BP 39, fol. 89.

53 WD 22–135.

54 WD 22–103. For the work on occult qualities see Hall, “Boyle's Method of Work,” 124–141 (it seems less likely that the reference is to Boyle's Origin of Forms and Qualities (1666–7): see Boyle, Works, vol. 5). For further, similar endorsements see WD 22–23, 105, 108, 113, 116.

55 BP 24, 367–371.

56 Boyle, Works, vol. 2, 486. For the fate of Boyle's library, see Avramov, Hunter and Yoshimoto, Boyle's Books.

57 Careful examination of the original manuscript of Workdiary 22 (as of other workdiaries) suggests that there are sometimes different “strata” within Boyle's markings, though it is hard to be confident about this. See the digital images at www.livesandletters.ac.uk/wd/index.html.

58 Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 2, 345. For the earlier discussion, see ibid., 340. On the committee meeting, see Hunter, Establishing the New Science, 118–120. On the precise identification of the book see Avramov, “Men of Science,” 212 n. 39.

59 Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 1, 303–304. For other facets of this letter, see Michael Hunter's article in this volume.

60 Ibid., vol. 3, 384, 388.

61 Ibid., vol. 1, 173–174.

62 Ibid., vol. 2, 102.

63 Ibid., vol. 6, 214–215.

64 Ibid., vol. 3, 298.

65 BP 24, 355–357.

66 The first author in Hyde's text is Ibn al-Baitar (1197–1248), the great Arabian botanist and physicist; the second one is Ibn Khordadbeh (c.820–912), Persian geographer and author of The Book of Roads and Kingdoms, from which Hyde made his extracts; the marginal notes with coordinates of places are from Abu al-Fida (1273–1331), the Syrian geographer and historian (see Wallis to Boyle, 27 March 1663, Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 2, 71–72).

67 Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 3, 301.

68 See, for instance, Hyde to Boyle, 9 December 1679, Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 5, 170–171 (searching for book references on the “Jesuit's powder” in the Bodleian).

69 See, for example, how in October 1672 Edward Pocock transmitted to Boyle a requested commentary by Edward Bernard on the so-called Alhazen problem in optics (Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 4, 322–325), or how John Wallis reviewed a Chinese almanac sent to him by Boyle in December 1671 (ibid., vol. 4, 235–237).

70 See Hirai and Yoshimoto, “Anatomizing the Sceptical Chymist,” 472 and passim. See also Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 1, 345.

71 Boyle, Works, vol. 6, 395. Cf. ibid., vol. 12, 10, where he even claimed (in General History of the Air) that he cited books because they were rare and hard to purvey, presumably to benefit his audience: “but I have also cast in several pertinent Passages that chanced to occur to me in the reading of some Voyages, and other Books, especially such as either are out of Print, or are but in few Hands, or else are not extant in those that are called the Learned Languages.” It was partly this situation that forced him to use doxographic books like Gerhard's Decas quaestionum de metallis as discussed in Hirai and Yoshimoto, “Anatomizing the Sceptical Chymist.”

72 See Oldenburg to Lubienietzki, 3 January 1666/7, in Hall and Hall, Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, vol. 3, 303–304, and Oldenburg to Boyle, 25 November 1667, in Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 3, 369.

73 BP 24, 367–372. At pp. 307–336, BP 24 also contains a text comprising a systematic extract of passages from the book in the original language up to chapter 10 (more than half way through the book). This is a typical example of the transcripts of books in the Boyle Papers that are not in the hand of one of Boyle's amanuenses and the status of which is therefore unclear: see above, n. 34. In this case, the document is in the same hand as Royal Society MS 22, and it is conceivable that it reached Boyle in a similar manner. See appendix.

74 BP 24, 369.

75 WD 28–1002; the identity of the work in question is suggested by the endorsement in the workdiary, which reads: “U. of E.” For material relating to this treatise see Hunter et al., Boyle Papers, 64, 331–334 and passim.

76 WD 9–33.

77 See Boyle, Works, vol. 13, 365–377.

78 Ibid., vol. 13, 367; BP 24, 371–372.

79 Boyle, Works, vol. 13. 368; BP 24, 369.

80 Boyle, Works, vol. 13, 368, and see the passage, “One metallin kind is seldom find alone,” etc., in BP 24, 368.

81 See Boyle, Works vol. 7, xi; vol. 13, lvii.

82 For Usefulness, see Boyle, Works, vol. 6, 507ff.; vol. 13, lxv–lxvi, lxix–lxx. For Certain Physiological Essays, see ibid., vol. 2, esp. 150ff.

83 BP 39, fol. 52; Boyle, Works, vol. 12, 173.

84 WD 22–48; Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 504–505.

85 WD 22–16; Boyle, Works, vol. 10, 279.

86 WD 22–197a; Boyle, Works, vol. 7, 171–172.

87 The extracted passage is on 86–89 of The siege of Antwerp.

88 WD 22–202; Boyle, Works, vol. 10, 294–295.

89 Yeo, “Loose Notes and Capacious Memory.”

90 On the other hand, Boyle's memory may sometimes have failed him, as suggested by the fact that a quotation about a kind of clay extracted from the river Amazon from Pelleprat's Relation des missions to be found copied in Oldenburg's hand immediately after his notes on Mathesius' Sarepta in BP 24, 373, had already appeared in English translation in Certain Physiological Essays (Boyle, Works, vol. 2, 201), presumably because Boyle had forgotten about it.

91 For a document that possibly served such a complementary role, see the appendix to this article. See also above, n. 34.

92 Boyle, Works, vol. 7, 9. It would be fair to acknowledge that the reading notes may sometimes have been bypassed in the process of citation, with Boyle using memory and the books themselves even if he had already had extracts made from them, while for some books he might have had no notes made at all. For example, a heavily used book like Gerhard's Decas quaestionum is not reflected in the extant reading notes, and, though this may be due to the low rate of survival of such material, it could be because he consulted the book directly.

93 Boyle, Works, vol. 5, 51.

94 See above, n. 46, and Boyle, Works, vol. 7, 27–28. See also Boyle's Books, 9–10.

95 WD 22–124ff.; Boyle, Works, vol. 10, 331ff.

96 Halliwell, Catalogue of the Miscellaneous Manuscripts, 8.

97 See Hunter et al., Boyle Papers, 34–36, 68–70. The fact that MS 22 had evidently formerly been part of the Boyle Papers was first noted in Hunter, Letters and Papers of Robert Boyle, xx; see also Principe, “Newly Discovered Boyle Documents,” 58 and 65–66.

98 See especially BP 3, fols 111–113; BP 18, fols 92, 126; BP 19, fols 169–170; BP 24, 307–346, 361; BP 44, fols 56–93; and Royal Society MS 41, fols 25–32. It is perhaps worth noting that the examples of Clodius' hand in Royal Society Boyle Letters, vol. 2, nos. 17–19, differ slightly, though this is partly because some are of earlier date.

99 See Hunter, Robert Boyle by Himself, esp. xxxviff.

100 Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 2, 229–230. See also Clodius to Boyle, 7 July 1657, ibid., vol. 1, 225 (and Hartlib to Boyle, 27 April 1658, ibid., 267).

101 See above, n. 70, and Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 1, 345, 350.

102 See Boyle, Works, vol. 5, 370; vol. 12, 107.

103 This possibility is perhaps favoured by the fact that at the beginning of MS 22 are passages extracted in a different hand from that of Clodius.