Sir Hugh Plat

From pasta to coalballs and from papier mâché ornaments to fertilisers made from all kinds of waste products – these were typical of the novelties that Sir Hugh Plat advocated in the various books that he published between 1593 and his death in 1608.

Plat will already be familiar to some readers because of his prominent role in Deborah Harkness’ The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (2007), the title of which is actually borrowed from one of Plat’s best-known works, The Jewell House of Art and Nature (1594). Plat is there presented as a typical example of the vibrant, citizen science that Harkness discerns in late Tudor London and her treatment of him is juxtaposed with an account of Francis Bacon to illustrate the down to earth and inclusive nature of that tradition in comparison with what she sees as the increasing elitism of science in the following century.

Thick has been over much the same ground as Harkness and they both make use of Plat’s profuse extant manuscripts as well as his printed books. But, quite apart from the sheet scale of Thick’s account, which goes into each area of Plat’s activities in detail -- often with lengthy passages quoted from manuscripts – this book gives a different, more nuanced view of the man. Thick illustrates a greater degree of contingency than Harkness allowed as to just which works by Plat did and did not get into print and which were most successful. He also illustrates that, for all the appeal to public-spiritedness that Plat made in his writings, he was always eager to profit from his discoveries, in his last years even composing a letter to the renowned German alchemist, Moritz Landgrave of Hessen-Kassell, in which he tried to sell him alchemical secrets for hundreds of pounds. Thick also illustrates Plat’s continuing influence in the century after his death, when the pursuit of secrets such as had preoccupied him continued to play a central role in intellectual life.

In addition to outlining Plat’s entrepreneurial and intellectual activities, Thick is also quite effective in filling in their background: he is at his strongest on economic and social affairs and, though he has done his best in relation to intellectual history, he is here somewhat weaker, depending to an excessive extent on general and popular works. Indeed, from this point of view one suspects that Thick has not said the last word on Plat. It would thus have been helpful to compare him to another self-taught alchemist living in London at the same time, Simon Forman (1552-1611), who has recently been the subject of telling analysis by Lauren Kassell, while his entrepreneurship might have been helpfully juxtaposed with that of his European peers as studied by Tara Nummedal and others. Nonetheless, there is much of interest in this book, which gives a good sense of the sheer richness of the material relating to Plat, using it to give a readable and informative account of his multifarious activities.