Godwin, Francis (1562 - 1633)

• He was the son of Thomas Godwin, Bishop of Bath and Wells, born at Hannington, Northamptonshire. He was elected student of Christ Church, Oxford, in 1578, took his bachelor's degree in 1580, and that of master in 1583.
• After holding two Somerset livings he was in 1587 appointed subdean of Exeter. In 1590 he accompanied William Camden on an antiquarian tour through Wales. He was created bachelor of divinity in 1593, and doctor in 1595. In 1601 he published his Catalogue of the Bishops of England since the first planting of the Christian Religion in this Island, a work which procured him in the same year the diocese of Llandaff. A second edition appeared in 1615, and in 1616 he published an edition in Latin with a dedication to King James, who in the following year conferred upon him the bishopric of Hereford. The work was republished, with a continuation by William Richardson, in 1743.
• Godwin died, after a lingering illness, in April 1633.

Works:

• In 1616 Godwin published Rerum Anglicarum, Henrico VIII., Edwardo VI. et Maria regnantibus, Annales, which was afterwards translated and published by his son Morgan under the title Annales of England (1630). He is also the author of a somewhat remarkable story, published posthumously in 1638, and entitled The Man in the Moone. Apparently written in the late 1620s under the pseudonym Domingo Gonsales, it contains the account of a "voyage of utopian discovery". The book is notable for the role it played in what was called the "new astronomy," the branch of astronomy influenced especially by Nicolaus Copernicus. The latter is the only astronomer mentioned by name in the book, although it is also influenced by the theories of Johannes Kepler and William Gilbert. With Kepler's Somnium sive opus posthumum de astronomia lunaris (1634), some critics have claimed it as one of the first works of science fiction.
  
  

  Frontpage and title page of the first edition

  Frontpage and cover of the second edition (1657), now with the pseudonym replaced by "F.G. B. of H." ("Francis Godwin, Bishop of Hereford").

  
  
• The book begins with a prologue in which Gonsales explains how a voyage to the Moon is no more fantastic than a voyage to America was considered earlier. The account proper contains a number of travel narratives, starting in Spain and ending in China. Godwin proposes that the earth is magnetic, and that only an initial push is necessary to escape its magnetic attraction. The energy necessary for this push is provided by a species of bird called gansas, specifically trained for the purpose.
• Galileo Galilei's 1610 publication Sidereus Nuncius had a great influence on Godwin's astronomical theories, but unlike Galileo, and like Kepler, Godwin proposes that the dark spots on the Moon are seas, one of many similarities between The Man in the Moone and Kepler's Somnium. Once on the Moon, Gonsales finds it inhabited by tall Christian people who live a happy and carefree life in a kind of pastoral paradise.
• The work, which displays considerable fancy and wit, influenced John Wilkins "The discovery of a world in the Moone". Both works were translated into French, and were imitated in several important particulars by Cyrano de Bergerac, from whom (if not from Godwin directly) Jonathan Swift obtained valuable hints in writing of "Gulliver's voyage to Laputa".