Michael Cyril William Hunter FBA FRHistS (born 1949) is Emeritus Professor of History in the department of history, classics and archaeology and a Fellow of Birkbeck, University of London.
Hunter is interested in the culture of early modern England. He specialises in the history of science in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, particularly the work of Robert Boyle. In Noel Malcolm’s judgement, Hunter “has done more for Boyle studies than anyone before him (or, one might almost say, than all previous Boyle scholars put together)”.
Books in order of publication:
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
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