*Ø* Blogmanac | A book found in the stomach of a cod fish

Continued from yesterday (see below)

Vox Piscis and the strange case of the ichthiobibliophage
Part the Second

We saw yesterday that on Misummer’s Eve, 1626, when a Cambridge, England fishmonger cut open the belly of a cod fish, out popped a book containing a number of religious treatises, including Praeparatio Crucem or Of the Preparation to the Cross and A Lettre which was Written to the Faithfull Followers of Christes Gospell. The original literary detective work on this strange book was done by a scholar and theologian by the name of Dr Joseph Mede, a fellow of Christ's College Cambridge. But who wrote this book, which came to be reprinted in 1627 as ‘Vox Piscis’, and how did it get inside the cod?

Much of this is still a mystery. When the book was reprinted the preface was written by Thomas Goad, a Cambridge graduate and cleric who held the post of president chaplain to Archbishop George Abbot. Goad was also the rector of the Suffolk parish of Hadleigh and a canon in Winchester Cathedral. Goad’s preface attributed the writings to the early English reformer John Frith, who was burned at the stake for his faith on July 4, 1533. Frith’s great crime had been to distribute contraband Protestant books.

The book, Goad said, had been ‘a long time drowned in the Deepes of Lyn', but now, by the design of divine providence, were `brought backe againe to land', by `a strange living vessell’ to refresh ‘thirsty soules’ once more.

From detailed detective work undertaken by modern bibliographers, who examined the typefaces and could tell exactly which printing presses had been used in the book’s publication, we know that some, but possibly not all, of the book was indeed written by Frith. This he did while a prisoner in 1532, convicted of heresy during the period of immense religious social and religious upheaval in Europe – the Protestant Reformation.

John Frith was a follower of Protestant reformers Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus. In later life he was a close associate of William Tyndale, the first person to translate the Bible into English (seen as a radical and even heretical act by the Catholic church in those days).

Like the other protagonists of our fish’s take, as a young man Frith resided in Cambridge where he and firebrand mates such as Hugh Latimer, John Bradford and Thomas Bilney gathered informally at a pub known as the White Horse, popularly called ‘Little Germany’ because of the German Protestantism exciting the young intellectuals of the day, and there they drank a pint or two and discussed the works of Luther and other contemporary reformers of the Catholic church. In other words, they were a bunch of student radicals, and, as is the wont of passionate progressives in all countries and all times, they drew the attention of the authorities, and they were labelled heretics.

For his student activism, Frith, like his comrades, was thrown into prison. Not any ordinary prison. Their underground hell-hole, deep within not Cambridge but Oxford University, was a cellar. But not just any cellar. Frith and his colleagues were confined in a cellar used for the salting of fish – cod fish, no doubt, being chief amongst them.


Vox Piscis: or The Book-Fish: Providence and the Uses of the Reformation Past in Caroline Cambridge. (Critical Essay by Alexandra Walsham, 1999)
John Frith's final year

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