Roger Bowers

Roger Bowers retired from his position as University Reader in Medieval and Renaissance Music in 2005, but remains active both as Fellow of Jesus College, where he is Director of Studies in Music, and in research and publication.

After studying Law and graduating in Modern History at the University of Oxford in 1965, he obtained a Ph.D. from the School of Fine Arts and Music, University of East Anglia in 1975. He became a research fellow in the Department of Music, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham in 1977, and took up his erstwhile position at Cambridge University in 1978. From 1991 to 1993 he enjoyed a Research Readership awarded by the British Academy. His current research is centred on, though not limited to, aspects of the cultural, social, ecclesiastical and political history of England in the late medieval and early modern periods (c.1340-1640); he is working also on the biographies of Guillaume de Machaut and Claudio Monteverdi, and on the notation of the music of the Renaissance and early Baroque. While all of this work is informed principally by the endeavours in Musicology which formed the basis of his Faculty teaching, recent publications have concerned also such subjects as the political and religious history of mid-Tudor England, the history of education in late medieval England, and theatre history in the period immediately preceding Shakespeare. His present interests -- comprehensively represented in his book English Church Polyphony: Singers and Sources from the fourteenth Century to the Seventeenth (1999) -- encompass all manner of aspects of the complex interactions between the composition of music in England, the nature of the forces which the church and the social elites saw fit to furnish for its performance, and the political and religious considerations applied by those whom the musicians were constrained to please. He also works on certain abiding problems of transcription, especially the understanding of the finer points of the notation of music composed between c.1500 and c.1630. He has supervised a number of M.Phil. studies and Ph.D. dissertations, on a variety of topics within his spheres of interest.

His immediate endeavour lies in the completion of two books, to be entitled Liturgy and Musicians in the English Parish Church, 1460 -1547, and Liturgy, Music and Politics in the English Reformation, 1520-1575.

Publications