Penelope Gouk Editor & Author

Penelope Gouk is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK, where she lectured until her retirement. Throughout her career the dominant theme of her research has been the intellectual history of music in early modern science and medicine. Most recently she has been investigating changing explanations for music's emotional effects, especially in Britain. Her publications include Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (1999) and edited volumes Musical Healing in Cultural Contexts (2000) and, with Helen Hills Representing Emotions: New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music and Medicine (2005).

James Kennaway is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Roehampton in London, UK. He has written extensively on the history of medicine and music, notably in his 2012 monograph Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease.

Jacomien Prins is Assistant Professor/Researcher at the Ca’Foscari University of Venice, Italy. She has worked extensively on the interaction between music theory and philosophy in the Renaissance. Her work includes Echoes of an Invisible World: Marsilio Ficino and Francesco Patrizi on Cosmic Order and Music Theory (2014), Sing Aloud Harmonious Spheres: Renaissance Conceptions of Cosmic Harmony (2017), and an edition and translation of Marsilio Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Timaeus (Harvard University Press, the I Tatti Renaissance Library series (ITRL)).

Wiebke Thormählen is Area Leader in History at the Royal College of Music in London, UK. Her research focuses on the formulation of music as a language of emotions and its particular role in educational theories and policies since the eighteenth century. Recently awarded a three-year collaborative research grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Music, Home and Heritage: Sounding the Domestic in Georgian Britain) she explores the interaction of the domestic with the public in musical arrangements, in devotional music and in the relationship between music as domestic social activity and amateur choral societies in Britain.