Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle's Sister

By Michelle DiMeo

For centuries, historians have speculated about the life of Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh. Dominant depictions show her either as a maternal figure to her younger brother Robert Boyle, one of the most significant scientists of his day, or as a patroness of the European correspondence network now known as the Hartlib circle—but neither portrait captures the depth of her intellect or the range of her knowledge and influence.
 
Philosophers, mathematicians, politicians, and religious authorities sought her opinion on everything from decimalizing the currency to producing Hebrew grammars. She practiced medicine alongside distinguished male physicians, treating some of the most elite patients in London. Her medical recipes, political commentaries, and testimony concerning the philosophers’ stone gained international circulation. She was an important influence on Boyle and a formidable thinker in her own right.
 
Drawing from a wealth of new archival sources, Michelle DiMeo fills out Lady Ranelagh’s legacy in the context of a historically sensitive and nuanced interpretation of gender, science, and religion. The book re-creates the intellectual life of one of the most respected and influential women in seventeenth-century Europe, revealing how she managed to gain the admiration of diverse contemporaries, effect social change, and shape contemporary science.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226731742

Book preview

Lady Ranelagh

Synthesis

A series in the history of chemistry, broadly construed, edited by Carin Berkowitz, Angela N. H. Creager, John E. Lesch, Lawrence M. Principe, Alan Rocke, and E. C. Spary, in partnership with the Science History Institute

Lady Ranelagh

The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Sister

Michelle DiMeo

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-73160-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-73174-2 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226731742.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: DiMeo, Michelle, author.

Title: Lady Ranelagh : the incomparable life of Robert Boyle’s sister / Michelle DiMeo.

Other titles: Synthesis (University of Chicago. Press)

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Series: Synthesis | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020038658 | ISBN 9780226731605 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226731742 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Ranelagh, Lady. | Boyle, Robert, 1627–1691—Family. | Women scientists—Great Britain—Biography. | Women physicians—Great Britain—Biography. | Women intellectuals—Great Britain—Biography. | Science—Great Britain—History—17th century. | Medicine—Great Britain—History—17th century. | Great Britain—Intellectual life—17th century. | Great Britain—Religion—17th century. | LCGFT: Biographies.

Classification: LCC Q143.R26 D337 2021 | DDC 509.2 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020038658

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

In memory of my incomparable parents,

Danny DiMeo and

Judy Puleo Winikates

Contents

List of Illustrations

Note on Conventions

Introduction

1. Birth, Childhood, and Marriage (1615–42)

2. Early Days in the Hartlib Circle (1642–48)

3. Formative Years in Natural Philosophy and Medicine (1649–56)

4. Return to Ireland (1656–59)

5. Death of the Hartlib Circle and Birth of the Royal Society (1658–67)

6. Plague, Providence, and Medical Practice (1665–67)

7. Robert Boyle Moves In (1668–90)

Conclusion: Death and Legacy

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Boyle Family Genealogy

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figure 1. Boyle Monument at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin.

Figure 2. Thomas Phillips, Athlone Bridge and Castle, 1685.

Figure 3. Portrait of Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh.

Figure 4. Copy of a medical recipe book compiled by Lady Ranelagh, My Lady Rennelagh’s Choice Receipts.

Figure 5. Coat of arms for Jones, Viscount Ranelagh, from John Lodge’s Peerage of Ireland.

Figure 6. Letter from Lady Katherine Ranelagh to Samuel Hartlib, 1659.

Figure 7. Robert Boyle, dedication to his sister Ranelagh, Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects, 1665.

Figure 8. Richard Blome, map of the parish of St. James, Westminster, 1685.

Figure 9. Johann Kerseboom, The Shannon Portrait of the Hon. Robert Boyle F.R.S., 1689.

Figure 10. Plaques commemorating Robert Boyle and Lady Ranelagh at Lismore Castle, Ireland.

Note on Conventions

Calendar

I have used the New Style calendar throughout the book, taking January 1 (not March 25) as the start of the new year. As such, though Lady Ranelagh was born on March 22, 1614/15, I have stated her birth as March 22, 1615. However, I have not made a full conversion to the Gregorian calendar, which would mean adding ten days to the English dates. For the international letters in the Hartlib Papers archive that include both dates—the English and continental—I have retained this. Therefore, some letters will include dates such as May 5/15, 1658. When only one date is given, the English New Style calendar is implied.

Transcriptions

For ease of reading, contractions have been silently expanded, superscripts removed, and u/v, i/j, and ye/the modernized. Apart from this, I have retained the original spelling, punctuation, and midsentence capitalization for all manuscript transcriptions. However, many letters exist only as printed copies or are available in helpful modern editions. In these cases, I quote from the copy and adopt their style.

Introduction

When Robert Boyle and Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh died within one week of each other in December 1691 after having lived together for the previous twenty-three years, Bishop Gilbert Burnet struggled to eulogize the great natural philosopher without also acknowledging his formidable sister. Noting that she lived the longest on the publickest Scene, she made the greatest Figure in all the Revolutions of the Kingdoms for above fifty Years, of any Woman of our Age, he concluded, "Such a Sister became such a Brother."¹ It is not hard to find praise of the Incomparable Lady Ranelagh, as her contemporaries often called her, in the letters and diaries of those who knew her. John Evelyn referred to her as a person of extraordinary Talents, and to Henry Oldenburg she was that very noble and pious Lady Ranelagh.² She is one of a few early modern women we know to have lived a public intellectual life without attracting criticism. Moreover, her influence on Robert Boyle was significant and spanned his entire life—a point acknowledged by his contemporaries and, for centuries after, his biographers.

When one considers the high public reputation Lady Ranelagh enjoyed in her own time, it may seem surprising that she remains a shadowy figure today. From historians of science to scholars of women’s writing, and from Boyle specialists to historians of medicine, Lady Ranelagh is recognized as a woman of great intellect and piety. Nevertheless, the details of her life, network, and influence on her brother have been difficult to define. This is because, unlike Robert Boyle, Lady Ranelagh did not publish her works and made no provisions to preserve her manuscripts after her death. A seventeenth-century woman could often be an active participant in the intellectual culture of her time, but the decision to plan actively for her memorialization through the collation of a personal archive was considered by her contemporaries to be inappropriate.³ However, there are a few examples to the contrary. For instance, Ranelagh’s sister Mary, Countess of Warwick, was fortunate that her household chaplain, Thomas Woodroffe, preserved and annotated her extensive body of manuscripts after her death to use her virtuous life as an example for other women. The result is that we have several extant historical accounts of the countess’s life, even though she was a much less influential figure than her sister.⁴

In order to tell Lady Ranelagh’s story, historians must travel to the archives of her male relatives (held in four countries), or they must sift through the few scattered manuscript diaries, recipe books, and letters written by her family members and friends. What such a search reveals is that more than one hundred letters written by Ranelagh, several dozen letters written to her, a manuscript treatise, a copy of her recipe book, and hundreds of contemporary comments about her are extant. As well, modern scholarly editions of the works and correspondence of Robert Boyle, along with the digitization and transcription of the Hartlib Papers archive held at the University of Sheffield, have exposed a multitude of new references to Lady Ranelagh over the last two decades. Even within these modern resources, though, many obscure references to Ranelagh require a contextual knowledge of the source material as well as her biography in order to link them to her. This is because either she is not mentioned by name or her name was misspelled or truncated by one of her contemporaries. In both print and manuscript works written by her brother Boyle or other members of their shared intellectual circle, contemporaries would often refer to her as my lady or use a sobriquet like Sophronia; but we can now confidently assume that these are references to Lady Ranelagh thanks to circumstantial evidence. Modern editors have identified some of these references and have been using this new information to improve metadata records, footnotes, and indexes. Still, my research has uncovered many additional references to Lady Ranelagh that other editors and collections professionals had not observed, leaving me to wonder how many more I also must have missed.

This book draws on a wealth of archival material to recreate the intellectual life of one of the most respected and influential women in seventeenth-century Europe. What emerges is that not only did Lady Ranelagh help Boyle shape some of his philosophical publications and collaborate with his experimentation with chemical medicine, but that she was also an intellectual authority in her own right, composing her own theological and political treatises and corresponding with an international network comprising the most influential men and women of her time. Antonia Fraser once said, Sister Ranelagh incarnated the masculine ideal of a good woman and that her learning therefore, far from being a disturbing quality, became an added grace.⁵ While Fraser is correct that it was Ranelagh’s iconic piety which allowed her to develop a public intellectual reputation, and that Ranelagh’s deep love for and support of her brother was widely known, Fraser’s characterization downplays the bold, sarcastic, and outspoken part of Ranelagh’s personality for which she was equally recognized. Still, despite her strong opinions as a reformer during the Commonwealth and as a nonconformist after the Restoration, Ranelagh was able to maintain friendly relations with people of different political and religious views, and with those hailing from diverse backgrounds. She managed to uphold a high public profile and maintain the respect of each ruler and their governments from Cromwell through to William and Mary, demonstrating a talent for being politically savvy and a shrewd understanding of how to adapt to new environments.

By studying Ranelagh’s intellectual life against the backdrop of a developing scientific culture and changing political structures, we witness both the evolution of her thoughts and the ways in which social status, religious identity, and gender shaped her ability to effect social change and participate in natural philosophy. We also see not only how her early intellectual ambitions were often entwined within Robert Boyle’s emerging identity as a natural philosopher, but also how she moved more explicitly toward medicine, politics, and religious advocacy when Boyle’s interests turned increasingly toward experimental philosophy. This methodology follows Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo’s Telling Lives in Science, which argues for the importance of personal identities and life histories in the cultural history of science.⁶ This book considers Lady Ranelagh’s interests in theology and politics alongside her practice of chemistry and medicine; as well, it positions her gender as only one important demographic that must be considered equally alongside others. Consequently, it offers a more complete picture of how gender and science intersected in seventeenth-century England. Additionally, the rare opportunity to analyze a brother and sister who were engaged in natural philosophy at a time traditionally considered to be a period of rapid intellectual development almost exclusively for men allows us to aim our attention at how and when gender became an indicator of success or limitation. In other words, when issues of social status, religious identity, and familial connections are removed from the equation—all of which might otherwise taint a comparison between natural philosophers—we are better able to consider the question of gender.

Boyle and Ranelagh’s story also adds to a longer history of women who worked behind the scenes to support and shape their male family members who published scientific books and essays, held academic or institutional posts, or formulated theories that advanced their field of study.⁷ Ranging from the well-known collaboration of Caroline Herschel with her older brother William, to the lesser-known Winkelmann-Kirch family, in which Maria Margaretha and her daughters conducted important astronomical observations that were presented by male family members to Berlin’s Academy of Sciences, there are plenty of stories in the history of science where the household fostered intellectual collaboration and growth between brother and sister, husband and wife, or mother and child.⁸ Eschewing gendered theories of science and nature that can result in anachronisms, this book builds on the foundational work of historians of science such as Margaret Osler and Sarah Hutton, among others, who position questions of gender within a historically sensitive assessment of wider cultural and intellectual norms.⁹

Indeed, the fact that Lady Ranelagh’s life spans almost the entirety of the seventeenth century makes her an excellent case study for charting the development of science over the period traditionally known as the Scientific Revolution. Most historians now take issue with the term revolution in this context because it seems to indicate a sharp dismissal of ancient and medieval methods, when in reality many earlier ideas either influenced the development of new theories or coexisted with them. Still, the early modern period (roughly the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) was a time of great scientific discovery and advancement. Building on the works of Francis Bacon and others, philosophers began testing old and new theories with physical experiments, positing new and corrected systems of belief based on evidence they created or witnessed, not exclusively on texts they had read. The telescope afforded a new view of the sun and stars, which eventually led to Ptolemy’s geocentric system being replaced by new, heliocentric models of the cosmos. Advances in physics and anatomy in the early modern period challenged Aristotelian understandings of both the microcosm (humankind) and the macrocosm (the universe), which paved the way for changes as diverse as new medical treatments and Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chemical experiments and agricultural developments increased people’s understanding of their physical world, whereby studies of matter could flourish.¹⁰ The latter half of the seventeenth century also witnessed the birth of many scientific societies across Western Europe, including the Accademia del Cimento in Florence, the Royal Society in London, and the Académie des Sciences in Paris.¹¹

In the next two paragraphs, I wish to consider specific scientific terminology that I use throughout this book. The English words science and scientist are products of the nineteenth century, and the phrase most commonly used by Ranelagh’s contemporaries to describe their scientific practice was natural philosophy. This is the term I will use most often throughout this book because its broader scope more accurately summarizes the diverse subjects in which the siblings were engaged. Natural philosophy was the study of nature, but it often drew on philosophical traditions and religious motivations that would later become separated from scientific inquiry. Various formal scientific disciplines had also not yet been defined or separated, so natural philosophers could explore chemistry alongside subjects such as physics, astronomy, botany, or engineering. Likewise, while Robert Boyle used to be known as the father of chemistry, more recent studies of his intellectual life have eschewed such limited categorization, positioning his chemistry within a wider study of natural philosophy. In his own time Boyle became known as the English philosopher, and his experimentation intimately wove together his theoretical reflections on nature with the observations he witnessed through trials. His latest biography, written by the world-renowned Boyle expert Michael Hunter, has the subtitle Between God and Science, positioning Boyle within an intellectual framework that blends theological and philosophical inquiry with experimentation.¹² While he is most often remembered today for what scholars now call Boyle’s law (which states that the pressure and volume of a gas are inversely proportional when temperature is held constant), Robert Boyle’s contribution to the development and practical application of Francis Bacon’s guidelines for experimentation were equally significant. By defining a framework for sharing and testing empirical observations that supported mechanical views of nature, Boyle helped invent the modern scientific method.¹³

I also frequently refer to Boyle as a chemist. While the word may sound slightly outdated within Boyle studies today, his work within chemistry was as influential as it was diverse. Lawrence Principe’s foundational work, The Aspiring Adept, provided a new reading of Boyle’s Skeptical Chemist and revealed that it was Boyle’s eighteenth-century editors and biographers who attempted to expunge his alchemical experiments from the archival record.¹⁴ Scholarship over the last two decades has convincingly grounded early modern alchemy in a rich international and intellectual past.¹⁵ We now know that Boyle was one among many experimenters who sought after the philosophers’ stone in an attempt to transmute base metals into gold. Ranelagh’s newly discovered manuscripts suggest that she shared his interest in the subject. Historians of chemistry, spearheaded by recent etymological work by Principe and William Newman, have advocated that modern scholars use the early modern spelling chymistry to refer to chemistry and alchemy, as the fields had not yet diverged from each other.¹⁶ This approach is valuable in many situations, but here I have chosen to use the modern terms alchemy and chemistry instead of chymistry and the technical language of chrysopoeia and spagyria that accompany it. This is primarily because I need a language to distinguish between the different types of chemistry practiced by Ranelagh that will be understandable to a twenty-first-century audience of nonspecialists. Still, I use the terms chemistry and alchemy with caution and remind the reader that those in Boyle and Ranelagh’s circle used both words loosely and interchangeably.¹⁷ Ranelagh incorporated chemical ingredients and processes into her domestic medical practice as did many early modern women,¹⁸ but she was also writing in new alchemical genres such as the transmutation history and using van Helmont’s prized ens veneris to cure children of rickets. Basic chemistry increasingly became a part of a gentlewoman’s duties, some even using dedicated stillrooms for crafting medicines or including sweet secrets in the meal’s banquet course; however, Ranelagh’s engagement with questions concerning the philosophers’ stone suggest she had an inquisitive approach that reached beyond the practical into the theoretical and experimental—something seen with only a few of her female peers, such as Queen Christina of Sweden and Anna Maria Zieglerin.¹⁹

While this is the first book-length biography of Lady Ranelagh, it builds on several shorter foundational accounts about her. The first essay to sketch out the life of The Incomparable Lady Ranelagh was published by Kathleen M. Lynch in 1964. Helpfully documenting the various archival repositories she consulted in order to begin piecing together Ranelagh’s political profile, Lynch wrote the first account not only of Lady Ranelagh’s more intellectual pursuits but also of many of the details of her childhood and marriage. Decades passed before historians and literary scholars returned to some of the archives Lynch mentioned. When they did, they discovered some new material as well, thanks to improved cataloging and digitization efforts in these libraries and archives. Unfortunately, they also learned that some of Lynch’s uncataloged sources had been lost.²⁰

Forty years after Lynch’s publication, Sarah Hutton wrote the first entry for Lady Ranelagh to appear in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a brief but excellent starting point of reference which began to illuminate the depth and breadth of Ranelagh’s intelligence, influence, and networks. Around the same time, several graduate students—most notably, Elizabeth Anne Taylor (later Betsey Taylor Fitzsimon)—also began incorporating readings of Lady Ranelagh’s manuscripts into nuanced doctoral dissertations with comprehensive bibliographies that helped future scholars like myself begin identifying fruitful archives; however, much of this remains unpublished.²¹ Others such as Ruth Connolly and Carol Pal reworked parts of their dissertations and published journal articles and book chapters. Connolly produced a series of essays that focused on the intersection of religion and politics in Ranelagh’s works, correcting Lynch’s early assumption that Ranelagh was a Royalist. Connolly was the first to link Ranelagh’s radical Protestantism to her identity as an intellectual, contending this devotion helped define Ranelagh’s involvement in several high-profile religiopolitical cases.²² Pal contextualized Ranelagh’s letter writing within a larger international network of female correspondents, demonstrating the interconnectivity of these women as well as illuminating Ranelagh’s significant role within the Hartlib circle: a diverse, self-selecting group united around their common pursuit to learn, organize, and distribute all useful knowledge for the benefit of society.²³ My own earlier work focused on Ranelagh’s science and medicine, providing detailed readings of the three recipe books associated with her and reflecting on her rhetorical strategies for crafting medical authority in her letters.²⁴ The first essay to begin charting Ranelagh and Boyle’s shared intellectual pursuits appeared in a special issue of the Intellectual History Review dedicated to Boyle.²⁵ The challenge for the twenty-first-century scholar who specializes on Lady Ranelagh is that she truly was a Renaissance woman who seemed to know everyone and everything: alchemy, medicine, political theory, theology, languages, philosophy, and more. As scholars today tend to specialize within narrower disciplines, it is difficult to exhaust Ranelagh’s wide breadth of knowledge and experience.

Within the history of science, Lady Ranelagh has often made a cameo as the sister of Robert Boyle or a patroness of the Hartlib circle. This practice began with Charles Webster’s Great Instauration in 1975 and continued through Steven Shapin’s works in the 1980s and 1990s. However, the known lack of source materials on or by her appears to have dissuaded them and others from pursuing her any further. Lynette Hunter’s influential essay Sisters of the Royal Society, published in 1997, suggested that Ranelagh played a more significant role in science and medicine than was previously thought and argued that Ranelagh’s recipes were a domestic form of chemical practice akin to the experiments her brother was demonstrating in the Royal Society and his laboratory. Hunter also used one of Boyle’s recipes for the Spirit of Roses to show that he, too, made household distillation remedies, probably in collaboration with Ranelagh. Historians of science rarely cite this piece; instead, they usually refer to Webster if Lady Ranelagh’s name requires a footnote in their work. However, Hunter’s essay made a significant impact in feminist historiographies and literary studies and is still cited frequently in those disciplines today. While many of Hunter’s findings have since been corrected or refuted (including the suggestion that Boyle’s Spirit of Roses recipe can be used as evidence of his shared domestic practice with his sister), the piece was significant for raising Lady Ranelagh’s profile among a new generation of scholars just as questions of domestic experimentation, female correspondence networks, and recipe circulation were beginning to be acknowledged as contributions to empirically based science.²⁶

To address some of the gaps above and offer a more holistic account of her intellectual development, this book attempts to weave together the disciplinary strands that have been written on Ranelagh’s life. Such a book is possible only thanks to the more focused scholarship that precedes it. By considering Lady Ranelagh’s advocacy for nonconformists as being connected to her medical practice, for example, and by analyzing her wider political network alongside her alchemical correspondence with the Hartlib circle, we can better understand how she saw natural philosophy as an extension of these other programs aimed at improving society.

It is my hope that this book will raise the profile of this accomplished female intellectual in a variety of disciplines and spark new research that will expand our understanding of Lady Ranelagh even further. Indeed, while this is the first attempt at a comprehensive intellectual biography, it does not claim to be the final word on Lady Ranelagh. As I write this, I am aware of a new generation of graduate students and early career scholars—most significantly, Evan Bourke—who are continuing to find new references to Lady Ranelagh and are applying new methodologies to understand Ranelagh’s intellectual role in society. This new research has been facilitated by the recent creation of the RECIRC database at NUI Galway and improvements to the Hartlib Papers catalog provided by the WEMLO and Cultures of Knowledge projects.²⁷

Taking the form of an intellectual life, this book progresses chronologically, beginning with her birth in 1615 into the most prestigious Anglo-Irish family of the early seventeenth century and concluding with her death in London in 1691. Because her archival records are fragmentary, I do not necessarily give equal weight to all aspects of her life. The story we can tell is limited by the extant evidence that we can access today. It can also be difficult to make assertions related to shifts in her intellectual thought or changes over time when so few pieces of evidence exist. While the challenge for scholars new to Boyle (my former graduate student self included) concerns the sheer amount of extant material, the obstacle for Lady Ranelagh is the opposite. Young Boyle scholars may complain about his prolific publication record, verbose form of expression, and voluminous archive of manuscripts. This can make it hard to read and comprehend his works in their entirety and leaves the scholar questioning possible oversights, as Boyle may have addressed a topic again somewhere else but they just missed it. The opposite is true with Lady Ranelagh, where there are so few references related to her that we Ranelagh scholars often find ourselves citing the same few documents in multiple articles and hoping that we haven’t overstated a claim based on one small piece of evidence. Throughout this book I try to reflect consciously on such places where the assertions I can make are limited by the available archival materials, much like Sarah Hutton did in her intellectual life of Anne Conway.²⁸

Chapter 1 covers Ranelagh’s birth in Youghal, Ireland, and her upbringing in the home of the Great Earl of Cork. Cork’s bold personality and tendency to explain life’s successes and failures in providential terms instilled in the young girl a fear of an omnipotent—but still kind—God. Her mother died when she was a teenager, and she became a surrogate mother to her youngest brother Robert, who was only three at the time of their mother’s death. She married and lived mostly in Ireland until the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, when she was trapped in Athlone Castle for roughly one year. These early experiences provided a solid foundation for many values that would persist throughout her entire life, including her strong Protestantism and commitment to molding her younger brother into an intellectually and morally grounded man.

Upon moving to London at the outbreak of the English Civil Wars, Lady Ranelagh became involved in the international circle surrounding Samuel Hartlib—the intellectual network in which she would be most active. The second chapter explores her entry into what is now called the Hartlib circle and her rising fame in England’s capital. The earliest dated references to her in the Hartlib Papers archive regard her moral guidance of Dorothy Moore and John Dury, as well as her reputation as a nonconformist woman of excellent judgment. The latter led to her invitation to witness the spiritual prophecies of the young Londoner Sarah Wight. Ranelagh was already a well-known figure in London when her teenage brother Robert returned from a grand tour of the Continent, and Ranelagh introduced him to key figures who would prove helpful to him and would discourage him from joining the Royalist army or court. As the civil wars raged on, Ranelagh also wrote a series of political letters to influential figures one step removed from Charles I in an attempt to generate a peaceful conclusion to the war.

The summer of 1649 has been called a turning point for Robert Boyle, when he turned his attention away from only exploring explicitly moral and ethical issues and began experimenting with the chemistry for which he would become known. Chapter 3 shows that Ranelagh experienced a similar intellectual shift that resonated with the Hartlib circle as a whole. In addition to experimenting with chemical ingredients and procedures in her own domestic medical practice, she even hosted meetings in her home concerning William Rand’s proposal for a new chemical society of medical practitioners, one that would counter the Galenic College of Physicians. Over the next decade, Ranelagh and Boyle corresponded frequently about the intersection of natural philosophy and ethics, and Ranelagh continued to read and comment on drafts of her brother’s works that would later be published. She also shipped chemical equipment to him when he resided at the Boyle family estate in Stalbridge and, once she was certain that he had outgrown the solitary space he occupied in Dorset, helped him get settled into his new life in Oxford, going so far as to travel to Oxford to select his room for him and ensuring that he had access to a laboratory. Furthermore, Ranelagh expanded her own intellectual network within the Hartlib circle and beyond, learning Hebrew from William Robertson, who would later be appointed lecturer in Hebrew at Cambridge University, and hosting in her house Menasseh ben Israel, the first Jewish man admitted reentry into England in over 350 years, during his brief visit to the country.

Shortly after Boyle had embarked on a short trip to Ireland, Ranelagh made her own return to the country of her birth to pick up where her brother left off in reclaiming lost Boyle family estates, as well as to begin negotiating a settlement from her estranged husband. Chapter 4 covers the nearly three years she spent in Ireland in the late 1650s and demonstrates that it was a time of growth for her. Ranelagh’s location allowed her to develop a deep intellectual relationship with the mathematician Robert Wood. She commented on and then advocated for his proposal to decimalize the currency and worked with him and Miles Symner to complete Hartlib’s project on Irelands Naturall History after the Boate brothers, physicians Gerard and Arnold, died. Such projects concerning agriculture and planting may have been what brought her into contact with John Beale, who proposed to dedicate a horticultural book on physic gardens to Ranelagh and exchanged with her lengthy discourses concerning dreams. Ranelagh’s time in Ireland appears to have been more fruitful than Boyle’s because she moved there as an already active member of the Hartlib circle and leveraged the connections and benefits afforded by this well-connected group.

After Oliver Cromwell died, Ranelagh decided there was no longer reason for her to remain in Ireland, and she returned to London. Chapter 5 considers Ranelagh’s life during the tumultuous years immediately following the lord protector’s death and the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy. During this time, she witnessed the death of Samuel Hartlib and the dissolution of the Hartlib circle while her brother Robert Boyle went on to become a founding fellow of the new Royal Society. Though it is common in modern scholarship to treat the foundation of this exclusive society as a point where the door was closed for women, this chapter argues that Ranelagh’s courage and curiosity persisted. In the early 1660s she continued to pursue chemistry in a manner unusual for a gentlewoman, including writing a transmutation history of a famed alchemist called Dr. Butler that circulated widely in manuscript for over a year after she wrote it and that reached as far as the American colonies. After Hartlib’s death and the emergence of the new realities of Restoration society—with its emphasis on conformity and civility—Ranelagh applied her bold personality and esteemed reputation more explicitly to religion, politics, and medicine (the branch of natural philosophy with the most obvious charitable benefits). She and Boyle collaborated on making and distributing a copper-based chemical remedy to cure children of rickets (which he acknowledged in Usefulness of Natural Philosophy), and she read and encouraged the publication