Goshenite is colourless beryl, the variety with no colouring impurity at all, and it is named after Goshen in Massachusetts, where it was described. The name is nineteenth century and local, and it is a reminder of how many gem varietal names are simply a place plus a suffix.
The interesting history of colourless beryl is optical rather than ornamental. Clear beryl is hard, takes a high polish, and occurs in large flawless pieces, which made it a usable material for lenses at a time when good clear glass was difficult to produce consistently. Reading stones and early spectacle lenses were ground from it, and the connection is preserved in language: the German word for spectacles, Brille, descends from beryllus, and the same root lies behind the Dutch and several other northern European terms.
That etymology is one of the cleanest cases in the atlas of a mineral name entering ordinary speech through a use that has since disappeared. Nobody grinds beryl lenses now, and the word survived the technology by seven centuries.
As a gem, goshenite is inexpensive and little used, because a colourless stone competes directly with quartz, with synthetic corundum and with diamond, and beryl has neither the hardness of the one nor the fire of the other. It is sometimes backed with foil or coloured cement to imitate other stones, a practice recorded in the older lapidary literature and one reason old set stones should be examined out of their mounts before being identified.