(old series: GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-949)
‘Sermon’ has been written on fol. 1r in a different seventeenth-century italic hand.
9.6 × 15 cm. Twentieth-century binding. The gold lettering on the spine reads as follows: ‘BOYLE SERMONS 197’. The inside front cover contains the bookplate of the Royal Society, dated London 1945.
The Papers and Letters of Robert Boyle were presented to the Royal Society on 9 November 1769 by Mrs Emma Miles, wife of Henry Miles (1698-1763), D.D. and Fellow of the Royal Society.
TNA Catalogue entry; Hannah Yip.
Formerly catalogued as ‘MS 197’. According to Richard Yeo, ‘[t]he young Boyle wrote works of moral edification concerned with careful reading and proper direction of thoughts. […] The discipline Boyle prescribed – careful selection of materials, repeated reflection on key themes, and rehearsal of a skeletal direction of meditation – promised to expand the experience stored in memory and facilitate its retrieval’. See Richard Yeo, ‘Notebooks, Recollection, and External Memory: Some Early Modern English Ideas and Practices’, in Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Alberto Cevolini (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 128-154 (p. 142). See also Michael Hunter, ed., Letters and Papers of Robert Boyle: A Guide to the Manuscripts and Microfilm (Bethseda, MD: University Publications of America, 1992), p. 87; Michael Hunter, The Boyle Papers: Understanding the Manuscripts of Robert Boyle (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), p. 571.
The Doctrine of Thinking -- fols. 4r-43r