Michael Hunter

Education Hunter read history at Jesus College, University of Cambridge, England from 1968 to 1972. He then attended Worcester College, Oxford, where he received a DPhil. Since then he has written extensively on the history of science and intellectual thought in England during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in particular the Royal Society.

His most substantial scholarly achievement is his edition of Boyle's Works (with Edward Davis, 14 vols, 1999–2000) and Correspondence (with Antonio Clericuzio and Lawrence Principe, 6 vols, 2001). He also received the 2011 Robert Latham medal from the Samuel Pepys Club. In his honour, when he retired in 2013, the Birkbeck Early Modern Society held a conference on "Science, Magic and Religion in the Early Modern Period".

Personal life Hunter is a motorcycle enthusiast who likes two-stroke racing bikes.

Works

Other academic books include: John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning. London: Duckworth, 1975. Science and Society in Restoration England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. The Royal Society and Its Fellows, 1660–1700: The Morphology of an Early Scientific Institution. BSHS monographs, 4. Chalfont St. Giles: British Society for the History of Science, 1982. Establishing the New Science: The Experience of the Early Royal Society. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1989. (with David Wootton). Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Robert Boyle Reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in Late Seventeenth-Century Britain. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1995. Robert Boyle (1627–91): Scrupulosity and Science. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000. The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science, and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001. (with Edward Bradford Davis). The Boyle Papers: Understanding the Manuscripts of Robert Boyle. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Editing Early Modern Texts: An Introduction to Principles and Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Boyle : between God and Science, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. The Image of Restoration Science : The Frontispiece to Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667). London: Routledge, 2016. The Decline of Magic. London: Yale University Press, 2020