The C. J. Goodwin Award of Merit Committee is delighted to announce the three recipients of the 2024 Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit. The Goodwin Awards honor outstanding contributions to classical scholarship by members of the Society. This year’s awardees are:
Please click the links above to read the full award citations written by committee members Yopie Prins (co-chair), Rhiannon Ash (co-chair), Andrew Riggsby, Phiroze Vasunia, and Gareth Williams. To learn more about the Goodwin Awards and to see a list of previous recipients, visit the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit page.
Citation for Kassandra J. Miller, Time and Ancient Medicine. How Sundials and Water Clocks Changed Medical Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023)
This book intertwines important contributions to two areas of inquiry. The first is the history of time in the ancient world. Here Miller traces the increasing availability and salience of hourly time-keeping, considering both cultural and technological aspects, which eventually gave rise to Imperial Rome’s timescape. This involves sorting through an enormously scattered range of evidence in time and space, both textual and archaeological, from Babylonian prognostic tablets to the distribution and affordances of Greek sundials, to Martial’s structuring references to public, civic time-keeping. The culture of time is never static or uniform, but Miller extracts a number of features that structure that broader culture and which are then visible in the narrower world of medicine.
The second area is the history of medicine, and in particular the reception of these new temporal possibilities by the medical profession. While “short” time becomes more prominent here as in the broader culture, Miller is also able to track its status as a contested resource, used diversely by different persons and schools and in different contexts. Here, there is a clear core to the evidentiary base—a series of Galenic texts—but Miller shows an exemplary range of vision that reaches far beyond that corpus. She not only traces the nuances of Galen’s own stances, but also offers a compelling analysis of the changing positions and possibilities in the medical world up to and including his time. She deftly shows how the issue of precise timing intersects with other major issues in the discourse, both practical (e.g., the definition of periodic fevers) and theoretical (e.g., the role of inference from specific cases; the value of “critical day” notions); and – a valuable side benefit – she impressively sheds fresh light on how Galen strategically read his predecessors, enhancing our understanding of his dynamic role within his wider intellectual framework.”
This book makes a major intervention in the different but related discourses of ancient medicine and timekeeping, but its greatest strength surely lies in the fusion of those different proclivities. Miller shows an admirable expertise in the relevant evidence on both sides of the story that she tells, but the sum of her combined narrative components is far greater than its individual parts. For fluid and compelling arguments across different scales and disciplinary areas, therefore, we are delighted to honor Kassandra J. Miller’s remarkable achievement with the Goodwin Award of Merit.
Citation for Colin Webster, Tools and the Organism: Technology and the Body in Ancient Greek and Roman Medicine (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2023)
Anyone fortunate enough to have access to medical care in today’s world cannot fail to recognize the benefits brought by rapid technological advancements from one decade to the next in the modern history of medicine. Whether in the form of instruments and machines or processes and practices, technology is a dynamic work-in-progress that continuously aims at refinement and adjustment so as to find innovative methodologies that improve treatment outcomes; our understanding of the human body both informs the development of new technologies and is enhanced by those discoveries.
How, then, did ancient conceptualizations of the body relate to technological advancement in the first centuries of Greco-Roman medical inquiry? In broaching this fundamental question from a large variety of perspectives that move from the 5th-century BCE to the 2nd-century CE, Colin Webster offers a strikingly original analysis of this correlation between the human organism and the tools applied to its medical surveillance and maintenance. Rather than charting a straightforward history of technological innovation from Hippocrates to Galen, Webster’s book focuses intently on the inseparability of somatic conceptualizations on the one hand and, on the other, technological development and improvisation. Viewed as an organism made up of tool-like parts (organa), the ancient body was made susceptible to re-interpretation as a technological entity that was itself analyzable in terms of artificial innovation: the human hand, say, was pre-designed to hold the medical tool that served the body.
In this fusion of narratives of corporeality and technology, Webster’s six main chapters range impressively over a vast amount of textual and material evidence to weave a compelling narrative from many disparate parts. Webster’s book builds on important landmarks in recent scholarship on Greco-Roman medicine, but its theorization of the technological properties of the ancient body makes it a highly distinctive contribution to this field of study. His achievement rests on an imaginative vision of macro-developments in ancient medical/technological culture, his mastery of the copious textual sources on which he draws, and the control with which he coordinates the many interactive parts in the anatomy of his book. Tools and the Organism offers an inspiring example of just how inventive classical scholarship can be in experimenting with novel approaches to established forms of critical discourse. The Goodwin Award Committee therefore takes great pride in honoring Colin Webster on this outstanding accomplishment.
Citation for Naomi Weiss, Seeing Theater: The Phenomenology of Classical Greek Drama (Oakland: University of California Press, 2023)
Greek theater continues to enchant and entertain audiences around the world. Every year, without fail, a new production of a tragedy or comedy graces the stage in Athens, London, New York, and elsewhere. No small part of Greek drama’s appeal is its ability to draw in the audience, to keep people immersed in the performance, to rouse hearts and minds, and to move spectators to pity, fear, laughter, anger, horror, and many other feelings. We still know relatively little about those who flocked to see these plays in classical Athens, and our grasp of how they experienced the drama is small.
In Seeing Theater, Naomi Weiss aims to improve our knowledge of the audience’s experience and gives us a sophisticated way of thinking about the phenomenology of classical Greek drama. Juxtaposing tragedies, satyr plays, and comedies in surprising ways, this fascinating book insists on the embodied engagement of spectators. It explores the cognitive, multisensory and multidimensional involvement of human beings in the theater, in order to show how audiences participate in productions and engage creatively with performances on stage.
By drawing attention to affect and the body, Weiss reminds us of the complexities of theatrical representation and of the potential in ancient drama to extend the possibilities of vision, of theōrein or “seeing.” The Greek theatron, or “seeing place,” emerges from the book as a place for seeing that is flexible and multifarious, at once reflexive, philosophical, political, religious, evaluative, and affective. While this book is about “seeing theater,” it also pushes against the visual paradigm by insisting on the instability of the perceptual act, ultimately problematizing the visual as well. Weiss offers a remarkably lucid and insightful account of this paradox, proposing a new approach to the relationship between fifth-century drama and “theatrical” vase painting as an alternative medium for theorizing the heightened visual experience of theater.
One of the great merits of this study is its demonstration that the immersive experience of the audience is varied and complicated. It’s not just the case that every person in the theater sees the performance in a different way; it’s also true that instability and ambiguity are intrinsic to the reception of drama. The experience of an audience member exists in harmony with the words expressed on the stage, sometimes in counter to the words, but the experience always enhances the staging and elicits additional meanings from the performance. On behalf of the Society for Classical Studies, the committee therefore awards the Goodwin Award to Naomi Weiss, in honor of her outstanding book, Seeing Theater: The Phenomenology of Classical Greek Drama, for the light it sheds on the literary history of bodies and feelings.
