Professor Margaret McGowan is a noted dance historian and historian of early modern France, one of the first scholars to focus on the history of dance, in particular in the late Renaissance and the fin-de-siècle period at the end of the nineteenth century. Author of nearly a dozen books, she has published over eighty articles and book chapters. She won the Wolfson Prize for her book Dance in the Renaissance: European Fashion, French Obsession.

"In this lecture, I try to represent the different forms of dance and of the dancing skills of amateur dancers and of professionals. I shall show how techniques evolved during the Early Modern Period, and how and why the role of professional dancers became more and more significant."