Margaret M. McGowan, a British cultural historian who created a new international field of academic study, now known as early dance, and received national awards in both Britain and France, died March 16 in Brighton, England. She was 90.
Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her husband, Sydney Anglo, a fellow Renaissance historian. He said the cause was bladder cancer.
Professor McGowan, who was bilingual, exposed the clash of politics, ballet, design and music at the French court of the late Renaissance and early Baroque in her first book, published in French in 1963, “L’Art du Ballet de Cour and France, 1581-1643.” In that book, she analyzed the spectacular mixed-media genre in which kings and members of royal and aristocratic families appeared in public, and her interdisciplinary approach, hailed as ‘early modern’ by her fellow dance historian Richard Ralph, expanded the scope of dance history. Her dedication to research was lifelong and diverse.
Her scientific work reached beyond Europe. Linda Tomko, a dance historian at the University of California, Riverside, wrote in an email: “Margaret McGowan’s research on dance and spectacle in France, from the early to mid-17th century, vividly explored the links between dances and power operations is a research question that has since gained wide acceptance in American dance science studies and abroad.”
In 1998, Professor McGowan was honored in Great Britain with the title of Commander of the Order of the British Empire; in 2020 she was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France.
Margaret Mary McGowan was born on December 21, 1931 in Deeping St James, Lincolnshire, England. Although she could have studied French at the prestigious University of Oxford, she chose to do so at the University of Reading because, unlike Oxford, Reading would give her a year in France.
She stayed in France to teach at the University of Strasbourg from 1955 to 1957, after which she took a position at the University of Glasgow, where she taught until 1964. She completed postgraduate studies at the prestigious Warburg Institute, which is known worldwide as a center for the study of the interaction of ideas, images and society in international history.
Her subject was the ballet de cour at the courts of the French kings Henri III, Henri IV and Louis XIII; her advisor was the eminent Renaissance historian Frances Yates. The inspiration she drew from both the Warburg and Mrs. Yates became a source of lifelong loyalty.
Speaking in 2020, Professor McGowan recalled Ms Yates guiding her work on the ballet de cour. Ms Yates “understood that the material I was working on had not been considered in an interdisciplinary way before,” she said. “Musicologists had researched vocal music, art historians had begun to find drawings associated with festivals, and literary scholars had recognized the importance of court context for understanding lyric poems.” Ms. Yates, the pioneering French scholar Jean Jacquot and Mr. Jacquot’s colleagues at the Center National de la Recherche Scientifique have all mentored Professor McGowan in her pursuit of bringing those artistic elements together in a larger European context.
The importance of Professor McGowan’s 1963 book on the ballet de cour has been recognized by scholars in France, Britain, the United States and elsewhere. She joined the staff of the University of Sussex in 1964 and rose to the rank of Deputy Vice-Chancellor in 1992. She held that position until 1998, a year after retiring as a professor.
In 1964 she married Professor Anglo, who specialized in the parallel field of Tudor tournaments, whom she had met when they were both students of Mrs. Yates at Warburg.
In an interview, Professor Anglo spoke of his wife with intense, affectionate and wry admiration: “She was 75 percent of our marriage. I was 25 percent.” (When he wrote two days later, he gave himself a lower percentage than that.)
Professor McGowan has edited several books that bring together the latest work from a range of colleagues. One of those colleagues, Margaret Shewring of the University of Warwick, noted in an email that Professor McGowan’s retirement from university duties had brought new riches by allowing her to pursue many new lines of research.
Some of her books were mainly about French Renaissance literature: the poet Pierre de Ronsard, the essayist Michel de Montaigne. But she remained true to the interdisciplinary nature of the Renaissance itself.
Introducing her “Ideal Forms in the Age of Ronsard” (1985), she observed the pervasive importance of praise for Renaissance thought, as “the dominant mode in public life, in literature, and in the arts.” She placed Ronsard’s verse in the complex context of the mid-16th-century rule of the Valois monarchs. With “The Vision of Rome in the French Renaissance” (2000) she explored the vitality of classical ruins for Renaissance Rome and, in turn, the importance of Rome to French culture.
Her “Dance in the Renaissance: European Fashion, French Obsession” (2008) won the Wolfson History Prize, awarded annually to a British subject for excellence in history writing; four years later she published an accompanying volume in French, concentrating on source material. Catherine Turocy, artistic director of the New York Baroque Dance Company, wrote in an email that “Dance in the Renaissance” was “a detailed analysis of 16th-century society and how dance was central to the philosophical and aesthetic thought that shaped the current politics,” and that she was inspired and guided by Professor McGowan’s “insights, passionate views and new research.”
Her last three books showed the breadth of her understanding of the Renaissance. “Festival and Violence: Princely Entries in the Content of War, 1480-1635” (2019) linked public performance to military politics. “Charles V, Prince Philip, and the Politics of Succession” (2020) explored the dynastic politics of the Habsburg Emperor Charles V who used spectacular festivities as propaganda to impose the future King Philip II on the Low Countries. Her latest book, completed just three weeks before her death, has yet to be published: the title “Harmony in the Universe: Spectacle and the Quest for Peace in the Early Modern Period” indicates the distinctive scope of her historical vision.
Loyal to the Warburg Institute, she chaired the Review in 2006 and 2007. From 2011 to 2014, when she was in her 80s, she led the Institute’s struggle for independence at the University of London, taking the case to the British high court — with ultimate success.
In addition to her husband, Professor McGowan leaves behind a sister, Sheila.
In 1993 she became a fellow of the British Academy, the national academy of humanities and social sciences. In 2007, the British magazine Dance Research, where she was an assistant editor for 25 years, honored her with a special Festschrift issue, as “Pioneer of Academic Dance Research.”
