Joscelyn Godwin (born 16 January 1945, Kelmscott, Oxfordshire) is a musicologist, historian of esotericism, and translator. Educated as a chorister at Christ Church Cathedral School, Oxford, then at Radley College (Music Scholar), and Magdalene College, Cambridge, he came to the United States in 1966 for graduate work in musicology at Cornell University (Ph.D., 1969). He taught at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, from 1971 until his retirement in 2016 as Professor of Music Emeritus. Johann F.W. Hasler has described him as "without any doubt the leading authority on the historical study of speculative music."

Godwin occupies a unique position in Maier scholarship as both the editor of the standard English edition of the Atalanta Fugiens and the author of the most detailed English-language biographical essay on Maier. His edition, Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens: An Edition of the Fugues, Emblems, and Epigrams, with an introductory essay by Hildemarie Streich, was published by Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks in 1987 and later by Phanes Press (1989). It included the first complete recording of the fifty fugues, performed by Rachel Platt, Emily Van Evera, Rufus Muller, and Richard Wistreich, later remastered on CD by Claudio Records. A Spanish edition, La Fuga de Atalanta, was published by Ediciones Atalanta in 2007. His edition made the musical dimension of the work accessible to modern performers and scholars for the first time, revealing a level of compositional sophistication that most literary and art-historical scholarship had overlooked.

Godwin's biographical essay, "The Deepest of the Rosicrucians: Michael Maier," published in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment Revisited (1999), draws extensively on the archival discoveries of Karin Figala and Ulrich Neumann to reconstruct Maier's life with unprecedented detail. He established key facts including Maier's birth in Kiel in 1569, his father Peter's profession as a gold embroiderer, his claim to have produced the Universal Medicine "of a bright lemon color" during the Kiel laboratory period, and the paradox of his position as an unlanded nobleman — ennobled by Rudolf II but left without income, "forced into a kind of upper-class beggary." Godwin identified Maier's five-year English sojourn (1611-1616) as "almost certainly the fulfilment of a diplomatic mission" preparing the Frederick-Elizabeth dynastic marriage.

Godwin characterizes Maier's creative method as distinctively multimedia — visible from the Rose-Cross Christmas greeting to James I (1611), with its combination of gold-and-red word-emblem, four Latin poems, and six-part musical canon, through to the Atalanta Fugiens itself with its integrated program of image, text, and music. His musicological training gives him a sensitivity to the fugues' modal structures, text-painting devices, and contrapuntal technique that no other Maier scholar brings. His article "Musical Alchemy: the Work of Composer and Listener" (Temenos, 1985) and "A Background for Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens" (Hermetic Journal, 1985) explore the theoretical foundations of Maier's musical-alchemical synthesis.

For this site, Godwin's biographical research enriches the biography page with archival detail unavailable from any other English-language source. His edition of the fugues is the standard reference for the musical dimension, and his characterization of Maier's multimedia pedagogy informs the frontispiece discussion and the site's overall interpretive framework.