Research

Overview

I am a medievalist specializing in the role of music in identity formation; that is, how people used music to communicate values around gender, race, politics, and religion. My work seeks to situate music within its historical context, drawing on musicology, cultural studies, and literary history to ground our understanding of its component parts, chiefly lyrics, as well as the mediums through which it was experienced.

Research Interests and Keywords

  • women’s and gender history; queenship

  • Latin paleography and codicology

  • medievalism in contemporary media

  • gender and the music industry

  • critical university studies

Current Projects

I am currently at work on an academic book that traces the development of sacred music composed on behalf of and at the behest of British queen consorts from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. I take a historicist perspective that connects music to literature, theatre, and the visual arts in an effort to bridge the sacred/secular and personal/political divides.

A second book in the works will address medievalism in popular culture outside the mainstream, focusing on multimedia works created by artists from historically underrepresented groups.

Digital Humanities

From 2020-2023, I joined the digital humanities project Towards a Prosopography of Scottish Musicians Before the Reformation with PIs James Cook and Adam Whittaker. This aim of this major research project is to develop an open access, searchable database of musicians, their family members, and their contacts in medieval and early modern Scotland. We hope our work will enable further research on Scotland and its musical cultures, which have often been overlooked. The project was supported by funding from the Carnegie Trust.

Publications

Gower, Gillian L. “A Musical Letter from Eleanor of Provence to Margaret of Scotland: Patronage as Authorship in the Sequence Ex te lux oritur.” In Female-Voice Song and Women’s Musical Agency in the Middle Ages, edited by Lisa Colton and Anna Kathryn Grau, 422-456. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004517035_017

Gower, Gillian L. “Race-ing Plainchant: Theodore of Tarsus, Hadrian of Canterbury, and the Voices of Music History.” Viator 51(1) (2020) [October 2021]: 103-120. https://doi.org/10.1484/j.viator.5.127039

Gower, Gillian L. “Disciplining Guinevere: Courtly Love and the Arthurian Tradition from Henry Purcell to Donovan Leitch.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism, edited by Stephen Meyer and Kristen Yri, 484-508. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190658441.013.28

 

You can also find my work on the platforms below.