Somnium, The Man in the Moone, and Reading the Lunar New World in Post-Galileian Europe

Abstract

This study proposes a new perspective on The Man in the Moone, by focusing on the implied rivalry between the Spanish protagonist-narrator and its English author Francis Godwin in a narrative of (lunar) new world expedition set (and composed) in the decades of the Anglo-Spanish maritime encounters. In order to do so, it compares Godwin’s fiction with Johannes Kepler’s Somnium with close reference to early modern views of the “new world discovered in the moon” in the aftermath of Galileo Galilei’s Sidereus Nuncius. The shared fantasy of lunar travel notwithstanding, The Man in the Moone differs sharply from Somnium in its view on the lunar new world; that is, the two fictions ‘read’ it differently. While the threefold dream narrative of Somnium induces a cognitive reading, multivalent and non-acquisitive, of the thitherto unimagined new world, Domingo Gonsales’ narrative in The Man in the Moone discloses an essentially acquisitive outlook on new worlds, predetermined by his Spanish experience and anticipation of “speedy” acquisitions. Gonsales’ lunar ambition cannot but fail and makes him an inadequate reader/“messenger” of the moon, who does not even manage to return home. Godwin’s fiction implicitly reserves the chances for England in the race for new world colonies now imaginatively magnified to the celestial scale.