The origins and foundation of the Royal Society of London

Michael Hunter's The Origins and Foundation of the Royal Society of London is a scholarly historical study by a specialist in the history of early modern British science, tracing the intellectual and institutional circumstances that produced the Society's 1660 founding. Its authority rests on close archival work with the Society's own founding records and correspondence, and Hunter is a recognized authority on this specific institutional history. As a study focused on origins and founding, it treats the Society's early natural-philosophical culture, including the era's genuine overlap between what would later be separated into science and what would later be separated into alchemy or natural magic, with more nuance than popular retellings that project a later, sharper science-versus-superstition boundary backward onto the seventeenth century.