Although Newton's alchemy has received an enormous amount of attention during the last twenty years, these studies have engendered few similar ones for other important figures of his age. The contemporary of Newton most suited to such study is surely Robert Boyle, for his long-term interest, activity and belief in traditional alchemy has remained largely unpublicised. Though there have always been a few visible signs of Boyle's alchemical endeavours, ‘one is apt to overlook what an obsession [alchemy] was’ for him, as L. T. More remarked almost fifty years ago. Indeed, the marks of Boyle's alchemy have been largely glossed over, save by a few authors, and in spite of the recent resurgence of interest in Boyle, his alchemical pursuits continue to stand largely unintegrated into our portrayals of him. Much of the standard image of Robert Boyle persists from an earlier historiographic tradition which sought to identify heroic figures in the development of modern science. This tradition's dismissal of alchemy facilitated an extension of Boyle's occasional criticisms of alchemical methodology and epistemology to a condemnation of alchemy in general, and Boyle thus became a major point of transition from alchemy to chemistry. But neither the emergence of chemistry nor the demise of alchemy is so tidy, nor is Boyle's role so simplistic.