Tess Knighton is an ICREA research professor affiliated to the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and an Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. For many years she was Editor of the OUP journal Early Music, and has been founder-editor and co-editor (with Helen Deeming) of the Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music series for The Boydell Press since it was founded in 2003. Since completing her doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge in 1984 on Music and Musicians at the Court of Ferdinand of Aragon, 1474-1516, she has dedicated her life to research into various aspects of the musical culture of the Iberian Peninsula over the long sixteenth century and has published widely in the field. She has been involved in a number of major research projects related to that field, including the Leverhulme Trust Project ‘Music, print and culture in Spain and Portugal during the Renaissance, 1474-1621’ at the University of Cambridge (2000-3),and the CESEM Project at the Universidade Nova, Lisbon, ‘The Anatomy of Late Fifteenth-Century and Early Sixteenth-Century Iberian Polyphonic Music’ (2016-9). 

Recently she was Principal Researcher for the Marie Curie Foundation research project on ‘Urban Musics and Musical Practices in Sixteenth-Century Europe’ (CIG 2012), which resulted in several publications including a collection of essays by international urban musicologists on Hearing the City in Early Modern Europe (Brepols, 2018) and an interdisciplinary anthology entitled Els sons de Barcelona a l’edat moderna (MUHBA, 2016). She is PI of the I+D+I research project ‘The Contribution of Guilds and Confraternities to the Urban Soundscape in the Iberian Peninsula between c.1400-c.1700 (2020-2023) [confrasound]: MINECO, Spain, PID 2019-109422GB-100, and ‘How Processions Moved: Sound and Space in the Performance of Urban Ritual, c. 1400-c.1700’ [soundspace]: ERC-2021-ADG 101054069. She has published widely on various aspects of early Iberian music, and in recent years edited the Companion to Music in the Age of the Catholic Monarchs (Brill, 2017), Early Music Printing and Publishing in the Iberian World (with Iain Fenlon) (Reichenberger, 2006), Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America (with Geoffrey Baker) (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Pure Gold: Golden Age Sacred Music in the Iberian World (with Bernadette Nelson) (Reichenberger, 2011), and New Perspectives on Early Music in Spain (with Emilio Ros-Fábregas) (Reichenberger, 2015).

Recently she collaborated with Kenneth Kreitner on The Music of Juan de Anchieta (Routledge, 2019), with David Skinner on Music and Instruments of the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2021) and with José María Rodríguez on El Cardenal Cisneros: Música, mecenazgo cultural y liturgia (Bellaterra: Institut d’Estudis Medievals, 2022). She is preparing a monograph on Daily Musical Life in Early Modern Spain: Hearing Barcelona, 1470-1620, currently under review for Oxford University Press. She is particularly interested in an interdisciplinary approach to the study of music history, and sees music as an intrinsic part of socio-cultural expression, whether in the court environment or the urban context. Much of her research is archive-based, including court and church records as well as notarial documents.