The C. J. Goodwin Award of Merit Committee is delighted to announce the three recipients of the 2025 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 Andrew Riggsby (chair), James Uden, Phiroze Vasunia, Gareth Williams, and Emily Wilson. 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 James Ker, The Ordered Day: Quotidian Time and Forms of Life in Ancient Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023)
James Ker’s magisterial work takes the reader through three important studies of the “ordered day,” all the while keeping its eye on the notion of the quotidian these kinds of days enable. First, Ker examines the technologies of time-keeping the Romans used to structure daily life and, above all, the stories they told to explain those technologies. Second, he shows the ways particular structured day patterns are made to correspond to ethically significant forms of life. Third, he offers two case studies of the reception of these Roman days—in early Christian monastic and liturgical contexts and in the modern scholarly/didactic tradition of using daily life as a figure for the lived experience in Ancient Rome. All three of these studies point to ways in which days are made to add up or iterate into the “daily” or “quotidian.” More than a description of Roman divisions of time, then, Ker’s book launches a refreshingly sophisticated analysis of the “everyday” as a concept with a distinctively Roman cultural history. The Ordered Day is a multivalent title: the book explores both how the Romans ordered their days, and how the day ordered them.
Ker’s range is vast. He examines a panorama of primary texts from the Roman world from Plautus, Cato, and Ennius to numerous Late Antique authors. In addition to a core of Latin literary authors, he draws his evidence from documentary and legal texts, the pedagogical dialogues of the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana, and a good variety of Greek comparanda and observers of the Roman scene. He also incorporates a similarly wide variety of perspectives on time-keeping from historians of other periods, anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers. Throughout the study, Ker remains an unerringly subtle literary critic, never treating his evidence as a transparent window on Roman ideas. Even a direct description of daily routine, such as Martial’s itinerary of the hours of his day in Ep. 4.8, becomes in Ker’s analysis a complex, fascinating fusion of ‘social time and poetics’.
One of the great pleasures of reading this book is the stream of subtle readings extracting information not just from texts about time (for instance, Ker’s epic reading of Pliny’s history of time-keeping in the Roman Forum), but texts in which the rhythms of everyday life are implicit as a theme (say, the vicarious rustic temporality of the Moretum). Ker weaves those readings together in a variety of sophisticated ways. He charts a careful course in his history of diurnal time-keeping, paying close attention to what kind of story our evidence allows us, a complicated blend of narrative and thematics. Within that story he then untanlges the distinct threads of what has sometimes been lumped together as the rise of “clock time.” Thus, for instance, the history of the availability of mechanical technologies does not precisely trace that of their authority as opposed to celestial or bodily sources of time.
For this endlessly rich inquiry into the deceptively quotidian, we are delighted to honor The Ordered Day: Quotidian Time and Forms of Life in Ancient Rome with the Goodwin Award of Merit.
Citation for Andrew Laird, Aztec Latin: Renaissance Learning and Nahuatl Traditions in Early Colonial Mexico (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2024)
It is a rare accomplishment for a Classical scholar to write a book that not only shows exemplary habits of learned exposition, methodological rigor, and presentational flair, but also amounts to a strikingly original contribution to a non-traditional field of study. Andrew Laird’s outstanding Aztec Latin is in many ways a truly pioneering work.
The book offers a wide-ranging yet detailed and nuanced vision of how, in the early sixteenth century, Franciscan missionaries in colonial Mexico sought to gain an understanding of the Amerindian languages while simultaneously propagating the learning of Latin among the indigenous elites. In this dissemination of Latin, the missionaries drew on staple humanistic methods of philosophical and rhetorical education in order to Christianize the indigenous populations; but through their acquisition of Latin, the latter were also equipped to translate Christian literature into their own tongue, to give the missionaries insight into the mechanics of the Nahuatl language, and to set the stage for the construction of grammatical manuals that were based on Latinate principles of organization and rationalization.
Aztec Latin is centrally concerned with how the synergy and symbiosis of Latin and Nahuatl are fundamentally implicated in the far larger picture that Laird draws of cultural contestation and cohabitation in colonial Mexico. In visiting a remarkably diverse range of writings, places, events, and dramatis personae, Laird enables his vision of the interactive engagement between the Latinate and native linguistic cultures to emerge almost theatrically from a vast array of evidence, material as well as textual; and at no point does he lose sight of the traumatic effects and long-term socio-political implications of the Spanish invasion.
Beyond the confines of its own compelling argument, this book is immensely fertile because of the stimulus that it provides for much further research in this emerging area of scholarship: Laird has in many ways invented the field that he here cultivates so ably, and the fullest effect of Aztec Latin will surely be felt in the scholarship that it will inspire and inform in time to come. Meticulous in his own control of the linguistic evidence on which he draws, Laird models a form of scholarship that is truly interdisciplinary, hard to define by any one category of specialization, and inspiring in the sheer scale of its intellectual ambition. The Goodwin Award Committee is therefore delighted to honor Andrew Laird on his trailblazing achievement in Aztec Latin.
Citation for Julia Mebane, The Body Politic in Roman Political Thought (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2024)
Few tropes are more common in political thought than that of a population as living organism. The citizenry is a body; it has a head of state; its borders are its protective skin, and invaders are imagined as dirt or disease. The metaphor has a long and often insidious history, but its nuances differ considerably across cultures and eras. Julia Mebane has offered an original and erudite account of the evolution of the body politic metaphor across more than a century of epochal change in Rome, from the Catilinarian conspiracy through the formation of Augustan ideology to the fall of Nero. In its insightful account of how a political revolution was both concealed and revealed through imagery, The Body Politic in Roman Political Thought is a valuable addition to scholarship on Roman sociopolitical history and an exemplary first book.
Mebane uses precise analysis of metaphor over time to tell a startling story of historical change. In the middle and late Roman Republic, the primary goal of the body politic metaphor was to emphasize the necessary connection between different parts of the state. The persuasiveness of the famous Fable of the Belly, for example, derives from its ‘representation of contingent social groupings’ as ‘interdependent parts of a larger civic whole’. But the metaphor begins to shift its meaning as a result of transgressive claims that various statesmen – and later emperors – could function as a caput for the state’s body, and as healers for the diseased body of the state. By the time of Nero, the force of the body politic metaphor has been almost entirely reversed: its aim is not to emphasize mutual reliance between parts of a single organism, but the uselessness of insensate limbs without the mind and breath of the emperor. At that point, the problem for Roman political thinkers was not whether their state’s body had a head, but how it could ever function without one.
By telling a story of political transformation through the analysis of a set of related literary tropes, Mebane finds illuminating evidence in unlikely places. Alongside the examination of Cicero, Livy, Seneca, and Lucan, she accords critical roles to less expected figures (Cornelius Severus, Seneca the Elder, Philo of Alexandria). The Tiberian period, often a muted literary age between the bright lights of Augustus and Nero, is revealed as a crucial inflection point in the history of the metaphor, when the idea of the state having a head begins to shed its transgressive force and is cannily integrated into mainstream political thought. Several of Mebane’s insights also speak eloquently to the politicization of public health in our own time. When late Republican orators attack their enemies as a sort of disease, she writes, they replace ‘questions of legality with those of survival, conveying an urgent sense of civic crisis but obscuring the actual steps proposed to respond to it’. The metaphor of the body politic, she shows, is almost endlessly rhetorically useful, precisely because it hides as much as it reveals: it can be used to suggest several entirely different political ideas.
Early in the book, Mebane cites the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg, who argues for metaphors as ‘imaginative reserves that invest concepts with vitality’. For investing a timeless, even ubiquitous metaphor with fresh, urgent vitality, the Committee is glad to award Julia Mebane’s splendid The Body Politic in Roman Political Thought with the 2025 Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit.
