This presentation seeks to show how naturalistic attitudes and interests that developed in the sixteenth century were a part of Boyle’s intellectual milieu. Their influence is seen in the evolution of his reflections on natural philosophy. From early in his natural philosophical career, Boyle routinely appealed to the Reformation-era notion of nature as divine text, the elements of which functioned as letters in an alphabet. He framed his inquires in these terms at a time when his forerunners and contemporaries--Bacon, Hartlib, Wilkins, Beale, Wallis, Hooke, and others--were devoting increased attention to the workings of language, cryptography, and the need for a systematic linguistic representation of the world. These factors, taken alongside Boyle’s passion for alchemy and the discourse of secrecy and concealment accompanying this practice, gradually caused him to conceive of the “book of nature” as an encrypted text deciphered by mechanical hypotheses. This metaphor, which quickly became popular with other adherents to the mechanical philosophy, helped Boyle articulate elements of his natural philosophical method in a straightforward way, frame its epistemological limits, and situate it within a broader natural theological context.
