On the Boyle:
What’s new in Boyle studies?
Thanks to a generous grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, this website will be transformed during the first half of 2004.
The principal innovation will be the provision of a section aimed specifically at schools, providing an introduction to Boyle and teaching materials on him suitable for students doing Key Stage 3 of the National Curriculum, and the AS levels, ‘Medicine through Time’ and the History, Philosophy and Ethics of Science.
In addition, the catalogue of the Boyle Papers at the Royal Society is being revised, and this website will carry the revised version of the catalogue. This will be accompanied by digital images of the core section of the Boyle Papers themselves, a pilot study in making such material available on-line which should be of widespread interest.
Meanwhile, work is in hand to fine-tune the edition of Boyle’s workdiaries, and, when this is complete, this will leave this website and instead be available on the website of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, where more advanced searching facilities are available.
It is also hoped to update the existing features of the site. The sections devoted to the Works and Correspondence of Boyle (the latter including Robert Boyle by Himself and his Friends, 1994) will carry a full list of the corrections that have been made in the electronic versions of these texts issued by InteLex. In the case of the Correspondence, there will be two further features: a supplement comprising the text of letters that have come to light since the edition was published, and a concordance with Thomas Birch’s edition.
In addition, the Boyle Bibliography will be updated, and this section will give details of work in progress on Boyle and other relevant news.