Boyle Studies is, by a conservative count, Michael Hunter's sixth book on Robert Boyle – conservative because it omits the magisterial editions of Boyle's Works (with Antonio Clericuzio and Lawrence M. Principe) and Correspondence (with Edward B. Davis). It is also his third substantial collection of essays on Boyle, following Scrupulosity and Science (2000) and The Boyle Papers (2007), besides a further edited collection (Robert Boyle Reconsidered, 1993), a sourcebook (Robert Boyle by Himself and His Friends, 1994) and 2009's biography (Between God and Science). It is worth evoking the scale and scope of Hunter's previous work on Boyle, because it throws into further relief the broader significance of this latest collection. It should be understood, together with his previous works, as Hunter's plea for a fuller consideration of Boyle, one that gives due prominence to the variety, complexity and tensions of Boyle's biography and intellectual life, and the nature of his ethical and theological preoccupations in particular.

Since Hunter is without doubt the scholar most intimately familiar with the voluminous Boyle archive, and indeed the scholar whose labours have made this archive navigable and useable by others, this plea carries weight. This collection consists of nine essays from between 2004 and 2015, seven of which have previously appeared elsewhere (two as journal articles, and five as chapters in variously hard-to-find edited collections). Hunter has used this approach before, with Scrupulosity and Science and 1989's Establishing the New Science: The Experience of the Early Royal Society, and in each case it has produced a volume indispensable to scholars of seventeenth-century science in Britain. In this instance, as in those, students and researchers will be grateful simply to have all these essays assembled in one place. More than this, however, the essays taken together add up to a larger argument about Boyle's intellectual biography, one rooted in the new archival possibilities created by Hunter's work in cataloguing the Boyle Papers.

The contention that important aspects of Boyle's life and thought have been overemphasized and oversimplified in some contemporary scholarship gains specificity and force from the fact that it is often Boyle's own consciousness or deliberate courting of complexity that Hunter uncovers. This is most evident in the present volume in ‘The disquieted mind in casuistry and natural philosophy’. This essay (Chapter 5) is both the physical and the intellectual core of the book. In it Hunter explores Boyle's consultations with the casuist Thomas Barlow on a variety of theological and moral questions. Although, as he admits, there is little evidence of Boyle's employing explicitly casuistical strategies of thought in his natural philosophy, he notes that Boyle's engagements with natural philosophy were full of dilemmas of the kind that Boyle sought casuistic advice about when they arose in other areas of his life, and his responses to them are full of the contradiction and equivocation associated with casuistry. These preoccupations surface in numerous other essays in the volume, including Chapter 7, on secrecy, in which Hunter demonstrates Boyle's vacillating attitude to the subject – he was criticized at different times both for keeping medical and alchemical secrets and for divulging them too freely – but also, crucially, the earnestness with which Boyle entered into the arguments on both sides of the question. Similar issues arise in an illuminating chapter on Boyle's eclectic uses of print (Chapter 8), as well as finding echoes in Chapter 2, which deals with Boyle's early intellectual development and what Hunter represents as his Damascene conversion to experimental philosophy. Chapter 4, which treats Boyle's connections to Archbishop Marsh of Dublin and Anglo-Irish intellectual life in the seventeenth century, is not specifically connected to casuistry, but also invites the reader to seriously consider Boyle's friendships and correspondences with churchmen as an important and illuminating aspect of his intellectual life.

These perceptions of Boyle's shifting and complex sense of the meaning, purpose and legitimacy of his intellectual endeavours are rooted in the complexity of the archives, where the many iterations and drafts of particular works, published, unpublished or projected, amplify and contradict one another. Chapter 9, which deals with Physica Peregrinans, a compendium of information gleaned from travellers, sailors and fishermen intended by Boyle as part of a larger miscellany of fugitive work whose complicated genesis Hunter has discussed elsewhere, is typical of Hunter's essays on Boyle and English natural philosophy in the seventeenth century in including previously unpublished or undiscovered manuscripts as appendices. The almost unique extent to which Boyle's preoccupations, vacillations and anxieties about his life and work can be traced through his archive, and Hunter's unique qualifications for doing so, are perhaps the most valuable aspect of the studies in this volume.

Hunter's case for taking up these neglected aspects of Boyle's life and thought is persuasive not simply for the sake of completism but because it strengthens the links between the life and the thought. His criticisms of the version of Boyle put forward by constructivist historians are given a fresh airing here, in an introductory chapter that serves as a useful and appreciative survey of recent Boyle scholarship. They gain from his conviction that the focus on the constructed nature of Boyle's social and philosophical persona neglects precisely the complexities and anxieties of Boyle's self-understanding and of his sense of social and scientific propriety. Boyle Studies is a very valuable contribution to the literature on early modern science in general and on Boyle in particular, but it is also part of a larger programme, a career-long endeavour to give an account of Boyle's intellectual biography that is both archivally grounded and fully equal to its subject.