OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
“Strange Reports” was a work that Robert Boyle began to publish right at the end of his life and left incomplete at his death. The published section comprised accounts of phenomena that were extraordinary yet were ‘purely Natural’. The unpublished part, on the other hand, promised to deal with ‘Phænomena, that are, or seem to be, of a Supernatural Kind or Order’, and this can be reconstructed from surviving materials among Boyle’s manuscripts. It is evident that this component had not formed part of his original plan for Strange Reports. Instead, Boyle’s perhaps surprising hope to provide indisputable empirical evidence of the existence of a supernatural realm seems to have grown in significance in his later years, evidently due to his increasing concern about the threat of ‘atheism’.