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. Unike 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 Thick 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, medicines which he developed a cosmetics. Thick highlights two important aspects of his research, alchemy and enquiries about the current technology of various trades. Whilst 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 were then practised and tried, by patents or other means, to make money.