Officials from the Association of American Publishers have announced that the 2012 R.R. Hawkins Award has been presented to Princeton University Press for Peter Brown’s Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD.
The award, the top honor given by the AAP for its PROSE Awards (for Professional and Scholarly Excellence) was announced Thursday at the Association of American Publishers’ Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division annual conference in Washington. The awards recognize “the best in professional and scholarly publishing, as judged by peer publishers, librarians and academics.” This year’s competition attracted 518 entries of books, reference works, journals and electronic products in more than 40 categories—and represented a fifth consecutive year of a record-breaking number of entries.
In his Hawkins-winning book, Brown, the world’s foremost scholar of late antiquity, “examines the transformation of the early Christian Church in the waning days of the Roman Empire, through the lens of wealth and poverty.”
In addition, Awards for Excellence in five disciplines, from which the Hawkins Award is chosen, were also announced, among others. The complete list of awardees is here.
