The social significance of dance did not start with Strictly Come Dancing or the grand balls enjoyed by the characters in Bridgerton. It had been at the core of social activity during the French Renaissance, between the 15th and early 17th centuries. Likewise, dance had both social and political importance in England, where Henry VIII loved to dance and his daughter, Elizabeth I, shared his passion for it.
When Margaret McGowan started her scholarly research into dance of this period, few others were working in the field. Indeed, few scholars were looking at the history of dance from any period, let alone what it signified. Furthermore, McGowan was neither a dancer nor a choreographer, but a specialist in French literature.
Her interest in interdisciplinary approaches to study, particularly the connections between painting, music, theatre, dance and decor, began in her undergraduate years and continued throughout her life. She published more than a dozen books, notably Dance in the Renaissance: European Fashion, French Obsession (2008), the first full account of the pivotal place and high status of dance in 16th-century French culture and society, which won the prestigious Wolfson prize.
In it McGowan describes how spectacle collided with tragedy in the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572 as the ballet Le Paradis d’Amour, performed the same week to celebrate the wedding of Marguerite of Valois and Henry of Navarre (later Henry IV), became tarnished by a legend that the content of the dance had foreshadowed the killing. She also told how the English ambassador to Paris complained that no business could be conducted because Charles IX, the French king, was “busy with his dancing” and how five years later the French Court feared for the health of Henry III, the new French king, because of his “excess dancing”.
Margaret Mary McGowan was born at Deeping St James, near Stamford in Lincolnshire, in 1931, the third of four children of George McGowan, a manual worker, and his wife Elizabeth (née McGrail); her brothers, Paul and Geoffrey, predeceased her, and she is survived by her sister, Sheila. In her youth she played tennis and learnt the piano.
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She was educated at Stamford High School, where she was games captain and head girl, and took a shine to French. Despite having the opportunity to study at Oxford she instead chose to read French at the University of Reading because it was then one of the few universities where the course included a year abroad, which she spent in Paris.
McGowan went on to the Warburg Institute in London, where she maintained a lifelong association. At first she was torn between whether to study dance of the French Renaissance or the more outré examples of late 19th-century fin-de-siècle Paris, but eventually settled for the former. Her PhD was supervised by Dame Frances Yates, who had an idiosyncratic approach, seeking to find cabbalistic mysteries, or “unseen meanings”, in McGowan’s material despite her student’s insistence that there was “nothing there”.
In 1957 she was at a conference on renaissance studies in Brussels when she met Sydney Anglo, a young academic who was presenting his first paper. They were married in 1964 and he later became professor of the history of ideas at the University of Wales, Swansea (now Swansea University). Anglo survives her; they had no children. The couple lived at Withdean, near Brighton, though their London flat, close to the British Library, was a place of constant weekend pleasure.
McGowan’s first academic position was at the University of Strasbourg, where she enjoyed the artistic and intellectual activity of a city imbued with both French and German culture. In 1957 she moved to the University of Glasgow before settling in 1964 at the University of Sussex, where she was appointed professor of French in 1974. She spent her last five years there as senior pro-vice-chancellor, encouraging students to study their subjects in different contexts, such as reading history in either the school of European studies or the school of African and Asian studies.
During the 1980s she was involved in founding the Society for Dance Research, serving as assistant editor of its journal for more than a quarter of a century. Scholars from a range of backgrounds sought her out at conferences and Alastair Macaulay, former dance critic of the Financial Times and The New York Times, recalled seeing her in March 2019 when, as a member of the British Academy and by then in her late eighties, she attended an event in honour of Merce Cunningham, the American choreographer. “I had no idea of her age then,” he wrote.
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McGowan officially retired in 1997 but remained at Sussex as a research professor. She continued to publish papers and books, the last of which, Festival and Violence (2019), explores how art and war were combined in European Renaissance festivals. Weeks before her death she finished its counterpoint, Harmony in the Universe, examining the quest for peace through such spectacles.
Professor Margaret McGowan CBE, dance historian, was born on December 21, 1931. She died of cancer on March 16, 2022, aged 90