Contains correspondence, notes, notes on books, drafts, personal memoranda, translations, treatises and parts of treatises, experiment records and laboratory notebooks, and many versions of his various writings and treatises for publication. A prolific writer and active researcher, Boyle assembled a massive collection which documents his life and work from his adolescence to the last months of his life, although very few items are dated. The content of this material is so varied that it challenges succinct description. Principal topics include: atheism, chemistry, Christianity, hydrostatics, life in Colonial America, physics, science, and theology, among others. There is a wide range of correspondents, both at home and abroad. Boyle's correspondence spans a half century from the 1640s to the time of his death and includes communications with churchmen such as Bishops Thomas Barlow and Gilbert Burnet, with fellow natural philosophers such as John Beale and Robert Sharrock, with Oxford scholars like Edward Bernard and Thomas Hyde, and with eminent figures in the colonies such as John Eliot, as well as with lesser figures--alchemists and others in England and abroad. The correspondence affords researchers a wide view of the intellectual life of the period. There are also letters dealing with such topics as the project for translating the Bible into Irish with which Boyle was associated. The collection contains some draft letters in Boyle's hand, as well as many letters he wrote to family members. Additional correspondents include: Richard Baxter, Frederick Clodius, Samuel Collins, Daniel Coxe, Benjamin Denham, Joseph Glanvill, Samuel Hartlib, James Kirkwood, Narcissus Marsh, Henry Oldenburg, G. Pierre, Thomas Ramsay, Andrew Sall, as well as Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh and Henry Jones, Bishop of Meath, among others.
