It is almost obligatory for a review of a book about Robert Hooke to characterise him as ‘overlooked’ or even ‘forgotten’, and to complain of his eclipse by Newton. The most melodramatic authors will add the story – entirely spurious – that Newton ordered the destruction of Hooke’s portrait upon assuming the presidency of the Royal Society in 1703. In fact, Hooke has never been forgotten. The tendency to mischaracterise him as such tells us more about the desire of some historians to present themselves as heroic lifeguards – ‘saving’ historical figures from the sea of undeserved obscurity – than it does about historical reality. It received a stimulus in the 1980s, when a group of proudly iconoclastic historians declared that science in late 17th-century England – the remarkable period that produced not only Hooke and Newton, but also the Royal Society – wasn’t really about science at all, but about social class, power and politics. Armed with fresh translations of Foucault, they insisted that new scientific theories were accepted only when they were propagated by upper-class gentlemen. On this account, Hooke was ‘marginalised’ because of his humble origins, and science was just another kind of elite power game. 

Among the many merits of Felicity Henderson’s wonderful (and entirely jargon-free) Robert Hooke’s Experimental Philosophy are that she neither claims to be rescuing Hooke from obscurity nor obsesses over his social status. As she notes, there is little evidence to suggest that his career was fundamentally shaped by social discrimination. On the contrary, his life reveals the remarkable opportunities for social mobility in the 17th century, before the aristocratisation of the education system that occurred in the 18th. Born on the Isle of Wight to a minor parish priest, Hooke was able to study at Westminster School and Oxford University. At the latter, he became part of the extraordinary scientific community that emerged in the 1650s following the Civil War, which had forced educated men to turn away from the usual clerical career path and look towards mathematics, medicine and similar pursuits. In Oxford, Hooke became an assistant first to Thomas Willis, a pioneering anatomist of the brain, and then to Robert Boyle, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat whose wealth and origins were atypical among practising scientists and whom Hooke helped build a famous air pump. 

These men were attracted not only by Hooke’s manual and mechanical dexterity, but also by his knowledge and expertise, which he had acquired during his Oxford training. The same mix of talents recommended Hooke to the nascent Royal Society when, in 1662, it sought a curator of experiments. Over