• Who was Robert Boyle?
• What are the 'workdiaries'?
• When were they written?
• How did Boyle use them?
• Did their content vary over time?
• What do the workdiaries look like?
• Whose handwriting appears in the workdiaries?
• How did they survive? Are they complete?
• What condition are the workdiares in?

Did their content vary over time?

The content of the workdiaries varied during Boyle's career, in phases which may be summarised as follows:

• 1647-9. Workdiaries 1-5. Extracts from literary works and obiter dicta for use in Boyle's compositions.
• 1650-9. Workdiaries 6-18. Recipes and chymical notes, following Boyle's discovery of science (see Hunter (2000), pp. 25-6).
• 1660-9. Workdiaries 19-27. At this point, the workdiaries became fuller and more narrative in their style. They contain details of experiments on various topics, measurements of specific gravity, and accounts of conversations with artisans, travellers and others. There is a series of extracts from books in Workdiary 22.
• 1670-84. Workdiaries 28-35. There is some continuity with the 1660s, but chymical and other recipes like those of the 1650s recur. In addition, Workdiary 28 is a set of notes for treatises by Boyle.
• 1685-91. Workdiaries 36-40. Notes on experiments and on conversations with travellers, as in the 1660s.

See the text-only Table of Contents