Malcolm Thick offers a detailed account of the wide-ranging writings of sixteenth-century entrepreneur Hugh Plat—from his advice on dove keeping to his promotion of pasta for military expeditions. Plat’s career is challenging to characterize. The son of a brewer, he was not interested in taking over the lucrative family business. He went before the bar but never seemed to practice law. Plat instead dabbled in a range of fields, including alchemy, medicine, and husbandry. Thick explains how, as a result of Plat’s sundry interests, scholars working on a variety of subjects have made partial use of the man, citing him when necessary and claiming him as their own. In an attempt to combat this “serial stereotyping,” Thick provides a comprehensive view of Plat—not as alchemist, healer, or gardener but as “a Londoner trying to make his way in the world” (9). The overarching image that Thick paints is of a man not simply trying to earn a pound but striving to make substantial improvements to existing ways of living in Tudor London.

The book is organized by subject: medicine, gardening, agriculture, cooking, alchemy, and what Thick terms “scientific thought.” There is also a chapter devoted to two of Plat’s publications that primarily focus on food—Delightes for Ladies and Sundrie new and Artificiall remedies against Famine—as well as a sort of catchall chapter on inventions and their applications. Many topics, however, pop up repeatedly throughout the book, such as Plat’s various uses of papier-mâché and his invention of coal balls—a mixture of crushed coal, clay, and sand formed into balls to be used as fuel.

Thick begins with a brief biography of Plat, followed by lengthy discussions of Plat’s work on gardening and agriculture. Like his other pursuits, Plat’s interest in improving gardening techniques reveals his attempts to understand, as well as control, nature. He experiments with ways to slow flowering and speed up growth in garden plants. He also describes an impressive number of his own inventions, such as a device that transmits heat from fireplaces to indoor nurseries and a series of pulleys devised to lower plants out of chamber windows and into gardens below.

The following four chapters attend to Plat’s writings on cookery, alchemy, and medicine. An unlicensed practitioner, Plat’s medical practice was heavily influenced by Paracelsianism, an alternative to traditional Galenic medicine that emphasized the efficacy of chemical remedies and the significance of empirical observations over book learning. The final three chapters discuss Plat’s work on the technologies of various industries, as well as his numerous inventions and moneymaking schemes. Thick touches on several of the inventions described in earlier chapters, although the reader learns about new ones, too: a wagon for the military that is easily taken apart and reassembled, mortar made from soap ashes, and a machine that separates bran from flour. These final chapters offer a bit more context than the beginning of the book, in that Thick offers a glimpse of the intellectual world that shaped Plat’s work: the alchemists he sought out for advice, the books he read, and the beliefs that informed his medical practice.

Thick is quick to remind readers of the recognition that Plat deserves for his practical solutions to important problems. Yet, in displaying his admiration for Plat’s ingenuity, Thick has an odd tendency to pass judgment on his subject. He evaluates Plat’s inventions by modern standards; in one instance, he commends Plat’s knowledge of how to graft fruit trees: “whilst some of his ideas would not find favour with modern gardeners, much of his advice is sound” (72). Conversely, the author condemns Plat’s recipes published in Delightes for Ladies for skipping over key steps.

This book is steeped in archival research, and Thick has clearly pored over Plat’s writings. Historians, however, might find fault in the study for its lack of argument or engagement with historiography. The bulk of the book offers reports of Plat’s writings—albeit detailed reports peppered with insightful observations. The prose is clear and pleasurable to read, and the footnotes are relatively sparse, inviting a readership of historians and nonhistorians alike. The biggest drawback for any reader is certainly the book’s length (432 pages) and overwhelming devotion to detail. For instance, there is a three-page discussion on the various uses of dung to aid the growth of garden plants, and this is followed by nearly an entire chapter on soil fertilization. Nonetheless, this book provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of early modern technology, as well as being a rich resource for those who are unable to make a trip to the British Library. The author includes unusually lengthy excerpts from Plat’s manuscripts, in addition to an appendix with full transcriptions of three short manuscripts.