Professor Michael Hunter

Research interests* Teaching interests* Publications* Areas of research supervision* Contact details

Research interests

The scientist Robert Boyle (1627-91) has been my chief preoccupation for the past twenty years. I have been principally responsible for editing his Works (14 vols., 1999-2000), Correspondence (6 vols., 2001) and Workdiaries, and have produced a catalogue of his vast archive, now in revised form. I have also published various interpretative studies of Boyle, trying to understand his complex personality, and am under contract to write a biography of him for Yale University Press. For more information, see the Boyle website: www.bbk.ac.uk/boyle

My work on Boyle grew out of earlier work on the milieu of the "new science" associated with the Royal Society in its formative years, which I have continued in parallel with my work on Boyle. I have done extensive research on the history of the Royal Society as an institution, and on its membership. I have also investigated various themes in the history of ideas in the period, including changing attitudes towards magic.

More broadly, I am interested in the culture of early modern England as a whole, and especially its visual culture. I am currently directing a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a digital library of British printed images to 1700. For details see the project website, www.bpi1700.org.uk.

For my other interests, see the headings in my list of publications.

Teaching interests

I teach general courses on the history of science and medicine and on British history from c. 1500 to c. 1750. My more specialist courses are:

BA: Witchcraft and Society 1450-1750

The War of Ideas in Post-revolutionary England 1660-1740

MA: The Changing Shape of Knowledge 1550-1750

The Decline of Magic: Magical Ideas in English Society 1650-1750

The Origins of Environmentalism

Publications

The intellectual history of Restoration England:

[ed., with Frances Harris], John Evelyn and his Milieu (2003)

‘Scientific change: its setting and stimuli’, in Barry Coward (ed.), A Companion to Stuart Britain (2003), 214-29

Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in late 17th-century Britain (1995)

Science and Society in Restoration England (1981; reprinted 1992)

John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning (1975)

The early Royal Society:

[ed., with Michael Cooper], Robert Hooke: Tercentennial Studies (2006)

‘The Founder Members of the Royal Society’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2006)

[with Jim Bennett, Michael Cooper and Lisa Jardine], London’s Leonardo: the Life and Work of Robert Hooke (2003)

The Royal Society and its Fellows 1660-1700: the Morphology of an Early Scientific Institution (enlarged ed., 1994; originally published 1982)

Establishing the New Science: the Experience of the Early Royal Society (1989)

[ed., with Simon Schaffer] Robert Hooke: New Studies (1989)

Robert Boyle:

‘Robert Boyle and the Early Royal Society: a Reciprocal Exchange in the Making of Baconian Science’, British Journal for the History of Science, 40 (2007), 1-23.

The Boyle Papers: Understanding the Manuscripts of Robert Boyle (2007)

Robert Boyle (1627-91): Scrupulosity and Science (2000)

[guest editor], 'Psychoanalysing Robert Boyle', Special issue of British Journal for the History of Science, 32 (1999), 257-324

[ed., with Edward B. Davis], Robert Boyle, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (1996)

[ed.] Robert Boyle Reconsidered (1994; reprinted 2003)

 [For details of the editions of Boyle’s Works, Correspondence, Workdiaries and early biographical texts, and for the Occasional Papers of the Robert Boyle Project, see www.bbk.ac.uk/boyle]

Editing, and the interpretation of libraries and archives:

Editing Early Modern Texts: an Introduction to Principles and Practice (2007)

‘Whither editing?’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 34 (2003), 805-20

[ed., with Giles Mandelbrote, Richard Ovenden and Nigel Smith], A Radical's Books: the Library Catalogue of Samuel Jeake of Rye, 1623-90 (1999)

[ed.] Archives of the Scientific Revolution: the Formation and Exchange of Ideas in 17th-century Europe (1998)

'How to edit a 17th-century manuscript: principles and practice', The 17th Century, 10 (1995), 277-310

‘The Decline of Magic’:

‘New Light on the “Drummer of Tedworth”: Conflicting Narratives of Witchcraft in Restoration England’, Historical Research, 78 (2005), 311-353 [also available on Birkbeck e-Prints]

[ed.] The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science and Second Sight in late 17th-century Scotland (2001)

‘Witchcraft and the decline of belief’, 18th-century Life, 22 (1998), 139-47

[ed., with Annabel Gregory] An Astrological Diary of the 17th Century: Samuel Jeake of Rye, 1652-1699 (1988)

Early modern Atheism:

[ed., with David Wootton] Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (1992; reprinted 2003)

The problem of “atheism” in early modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series 35 (1985), 135-57

Heritage issues:

[ed.] Preserving the Past: the Rise of Heritage in Modern Britain (1996)

[with Peter J. Ucko, Alan J. Clark and Andrew David] Avebury Reconsidered: from the 1660s to the 1990s (1991)

The preconditions of preservation: a historical perspective’, in David Lowenthal and Marcus Binney (eds.), Our Past Before Us: Why Do We Save It? (1981), 22-32

The Victorian Villas of Hackney (1981)

Areas of research supervision

Intellectual and cultural history from the late 16th century to the mid 18th century, including the history of science and medicine, editing, visual culture and the history of the book; issues concerning "heritage" and its interpretation.

Contact details

Email: m.hunter@bbk.ac.uk

Tel: 020 7631 6283

Room: 264 (Malet Street)