Sir Hugh Plat

This book advances our knowledge of the scientific and proto-scientific community of Elizabethan and Jacobean London by means of an investigation of the life and work of Sir Hugh Plat (1552–1611), an author, alchemist, speculator and inventor whose career touched on the fields of alchemy, general scientific curiosity, cookery and sugar work, cosmetics, gardening and agriculture, food manufacture, victualling, supplies and marketing. Unlike many of his colleagues and correspondents, much manuscript material, in the form of notebooks and workings, has survived.

Plat has such a wide range of interests that modern scholars have tended to concentrate on that aspect of his work which most affects their own research. By devoting a whole book to his multifarious interests MalcolmThick can show him in the round, as a gentlemen of varied interests, as a man of his time and place. With chapters on military inventions, famine relief, and medicine, the book highlights two important aspects of Plat's research — alchemy and enquiries about the current technology of various trades. While his alchemical writings are (naturally) the most esoteric and complex of his surviving manuscripts, much of his work had a practical end in view – to develop powerful, effective medicines. His work on the technology of trades was by no means disinterested – in more than one instance he developed better ways of carrying out industrial processes than were then practiced and tried, by patents or other means, to make money.

One example of this entrepreneurial spirit was evidenced in 1596, (a poor year for harvests and consequent food shortages) when he proposed a solution to the provisioning problems of the Royal Navy: pasta. This was also a time when longer voyages made victualling British ships more difficult than in the past. In fact, Plat himself owned one of the first pasta machines in London and he eventually did succeed in gaining orders for dry pasta from Sir Francis Drake for at least one of his voyages.