Abstract
The last works of Francis Godwin intersect with three mutually reinforcing historical narratives: that of the explosion of transatlantic and transcontinental ‘‘travel’’ under the Tudors and the Habsburgs, speeded by developments in navigation; that of the fascination with alphabets, languages, and cryptography, including real characters and taxonomic languages, spurred by the reports of the travellers and by the philological energies of humanism and hermeticism; and the historical advent of speed itself——advances in speediness at all scales, interest in it, measurement of it. I shall suggest the logic of their relations through a glimpse at Godwin's influential jeux d'espirit, two sites where these trajectories intersect:The Man in the Moone and Nuncius Inanimatus.