Dr Margaret Bent
Girton College, Cambridge, from 1959. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, 1969: The Old Hall manuscript: a paleographical study. Lecturer at Goldsmiths’ College, London, 1972 – 1975; Professor (including department chairmanships) at Brandeis and Princeton Universites, U.S.A., 1975-92; Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford since 1992. She continues to supervise doctoral dissertations and to teach at all levels in Oxford and internationally, and maintains active contact with young scholars and performing groups.
Her research centres on English, French and Italian music of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Editions (some co-authored) include the Old Hall manuscript, English masses, and the works of Dunstaple and Ciconia. She also edited Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia for the Fondazione Rossini, 1998. She co-directs the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music, serves on many editorial boards of journals, publication series, and of the Einaudi Enciclopedia della Musica, and has contributed numerous articles to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.Some hundred published essays address technical matters of music theory, techniques of counterpoint, analysis, musica ficta, text-setting, and other issues that bridge notation and performance in early music, descriptions of new sources, aspects of musical transmission, stemmatics, and manuscript studies, interfaces with literary, historical and biographical questions. Her work intersects fruitfully with medievalists in other disciplines. The collaborative volume Fauvel Studies and associated seminars are one reflection of this; she collaborates with literary scholars on aspects of words and music and, most recently, rhetoric and the non-verbal arts. Her most recent major publication, Bologna Q15: The Making and Remaking of a Musical Manuscript: Introductory Study and Facsimile Edition (LIM, Lucca, 2008) was awarded the Palisca prize of the American Musicological Society