For a ‘Bacon-faced’ early Royal Society, ‘singular experiences’ offered the opportunity to delve into the inner recesses of nature. Had not the great Sir Francis commended the possibilities opened up by the study of ‘nature erring’ as a way of better understanding the normal course of natural processes? Pathology could be a guide to the ordinary. Such aspirations provide the theme of this comprehensively researched book which constitutes a useful addition to the still scant literature on the Royal Society in the eighteenth century.

Palmira Fontes da Costa shows how exploring the way in which the eighteenth-century Royal Society used such ‘singular experiences’ provides an illuminating guide to the dynamics of that institution. ‘Singular experiences’ involved the society acting as a corporate body in determining the authenticity or otherwise of such reported events. Such singularities were often linked to medical phenomena such as ‘monstrous births’, so their study brought to the fore the role of medical Fellows. For them the Royal Society's meetings were an opportunity for sociability and corporate intellectual activity; at the same time, the discussion of ‘singular instances’ exhibited their professional expertise. The book, then, further reconfirms the club-like character of the Royal Society, at least in the first half of the eighteenth century. To that extent it takes further Steven Shapin's emphasis on the way in which the early scientific movement was shaped by the canons of gentlemanly civility, including an emphasis on the importance of social standing in determining the reliability of evidence.

Yet this study also qualifies such a view, by suggesting an increasing emphasis on the importance of professional competence in weighing the validity of particular evidence. Another underlying theme is the way in which the early Royal Society was evolving modes of determining the reliability of evidence. The Baconian ideal of a complete natural history embracing all natural phenomena began to be pared down to more manageable proportions, and the omnivorous collection of data gradually gave way to a greater focus on what could be authenticated and, ideally, experimentally verified. As the author shows, two important steps along this path were the establishment in 1752 of a Royal Society committee to determine what had sufficient scientific standing to be published in the Philosophical Transactions and the decision in 1779 to give away the Society's Repository or museum. These were indications that the Royal Society was adopting a much more critical approach to the collection of data and the accumulation of curiosities. The result, suggests the author, was that by the later eighteenth century the society had begun to be less club-like in character, with fewer public exhibitions and less conviviality. The changing and more restricted view of what was meant by ‘natural history’ led to a body more preoccupied with following scientifically defensible modes of authenticating knowledge than with the amusement and edification of its members.

Some of the more significant of these findings are already in the literature thanks to the author's articles. The book adds further detail and a more comprehensive overview of the subject, including material on the larger cultural setting, such as the continued genre of satires of the Royal Society. The origins of the book in a doctoral dissertation are evident both in the depth of research and the tendency, at times, for the detail to overwhelm some of the overall conclusions. It is, however, written with authority and with an eye to the major debates about the character of the Royal Society. At last, the life of that institution in the eighteenth century is beginning to emerge from the shadows to which it has long been consigned.