Marie Boas Hall was one of the pioneers in the postwar period of the study of the history of science in the 16th and 17th centuries, the so-called Scientific Revolution.

With her husband, Professor A. Rupert Hall (obituary March 6, 2009), she was responsible for a series of publications, notably the monumental edition of the correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, first secretary of the Royal Society, which came out in 13 volumes between 1965 and 1986.

Marie Boas was born in New England in 1919. Her parents were college professors in English who collaborated on various academic projects, and her early education at local schools was powerfully complemented by her literate family background. In 1936 she went to Radcliffe College where she studied chemistry, graduating AB in 1940.

In 1939 her studies had been interrupted when her parents were granted sabbatical leave and travelled to Europe for six months, taking Marie with them, and it was on this trip that she first encountered the British Museum (where she helped her mother with her research on Shelley). The party arrived back at Boston on September 3, having heard Chamberlain’s declaration of war that morning.

With the US entry into the war in 1941 she devoted herself to radio work, which took her to New Jersey, Indiana and Chicago before she returned to the Boston area in 1944. Here, she took a post in the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, where she assisted Henry Guerlac in writing the history of the laboratory and of the operational use of radar during the war.

Guerlac was already a pioneer of the study of history of science in the US, and she resolved to write PhD at Cornell under his supervision, which she completed in 1949. Her thesis, on the mechanical philosophy, with special reference to Robert Boyle, was published in Osiris in 1952. By then she had already published various academic papers on related topics, and had gained a teaching post at the University of Massachusetts, subsequently moving to Brandeis University.

In 1951 she used her savings from wartime bonds to travel to England to investigate the voluminous Boyle papers at the Royal Society, till then almost ignored. During this trip she became fascinated by the potential of archival research to throw new light on the history of science in the period; she also met a fellow scholar, the Cambridge historian, A. Rupert Hall, who had come to similar conclusions after studying Newton’s manuscripts.

In 1957 she moved to UCLA; Rupert Hall followed her, and they married in 1959. Subsequently they moved together to Indiana University in 1961 and then, in 1963, to Imperial College, London, where they both remained until they retired in 1980.

At Imperial they made the Department of History of Science and Technology a welcoming home to a succession of graduate students in the history of science and medicine.

Both before and after her move to London Hall published prolifically. She continued her work on Boyle, bringing out a monograph on Robert Boyle and 17th-century Chemistry in 1958, an anthology of his writings in 1965 and the entry on him in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography in 1970, works which retain their value despite the burgeoning of studies of Boyle which has occurred in the past three decades. She also contributed to the Collins history of science of which her husband was general editor by publishing The Scientific Renaissance 1450-1630 in 1962.

Even more important, however, was the collaborative work in which she and Rupert now engaged, much of it reflecting their shared conviction of the importance of seeing manuscript material in print. In 1962 they produced a highly regarded volume of Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton, while by this time they were also at work on the edition of Oldenburg’s correspondence, of which the first volume appeared in 1965.

Since Oldenburg almost single-handedly managed the Royal Society’s epistolary activity from within a few years of its foundation means that this edition effectively comprises the national and international correspondence of the society during the first decade and a half of its existence.

Initially, the weighty volumes of the Halls’ immaculately prepared edition were published by the University of Wisconsin Press. That arrangement came to an end with volume 9, and volumes 10-11 were published by Mansell and the final two by Taylor & Francis.

As a whole, this magisterial edition has proved immensely valuable to all students in the field, and this will undoubtedly continue to be the case for many years to come, providing a lasting memorial to its editors.

In retirement Marie devoted herself particularly to the history of the Royal Society. In 1984 she published All Scientists Now, a history of the society in the 19th century, following this in 1991 with an account of its earliest years, Promoting Experimental Learning: Experiment and the Royal Society 1660-1727. Appropriately, her final work was a biography of Henry Oldenburg, published in 2002, which acted as a kind of commentary on the epic edition to which so much of her scholarly life had been devoted.

The Halls were jointly awarded the Sarton medal of the History of Science Society in 1981, while Marie was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1994. In their later years, the Halls moved to Tackley, near Oxford, where their active and productive life together was interrupted by periodic forays to London and further afield until ill health made this impossible.

Marie Boas Hall, historian of science, was born on October 18, 1919. She died on February 23, 2009, aged 89