The scientific and proto-scientific community of Elizabethan and
Jacobean London has lately attracted much scholarly attention. This
book advances the subject 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. Not much, however, is known
of his personal life and among his manuscripts there are few
letters, diaries or other private materials. What can be learned
about him is summarised by Malcolm Thick in the first chapter,
before he proceeds to analyse various aspects of his public output.
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. Most recently he has fallen amongst historians
of science and while they have carefully examined his written and
published works they have, in some cases, interpreted almost all
that he wrote as a quest for scientific knowledge, in the same way
that the gardening writers thought him primarily a gardener or the
cookery writers treated his cookery book as his most important
work. By devoting a whole book to his multifarious interests, Thick
illustrates Plat as a gentlemen of varied interests, a Londoner
trying to make his way in the world, and as a man of his time and
place. The chapter on military inventions, for instance, reveals
Plat as an inventor who talked to military commanders and bent his
mind to their most pressing military needs. His work on famine
relief was an immediate response to a run of bad harvests that
threatened the food supply of by far the largest city in the
country. The medicines he developed aimed to cure the diseases most
feared by his friends and neighbours. Even something as frivolous
as his work on cosmetics was of great value to those at court,
where appearance might dictate fortune. Two important aspects of
his research, alchemy and enquiries about the current technology of
various trades, were not so immediately dictated by the needs of
the time. While his alchemical writings are the most esoteric and
complex of his surviving manuscripts, much 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 was then practised and tried, by patents or other
means, to make money thereby. The chapters, backed up by a full
bibliography, references and documentary appendices, are as
follows: Introduction; Biography; Gardening; Agriculture; Military
Food & Medicine; The Writing of Delightes for Ladies and
Sundrie new and artificiall remedies against famine; Alchemy;
Medicine; Scientific Thought and Technique; Inventions;
Moneymaking.
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