Professor Marianne O'Doherty

Research groups

Research interests

• Medieval travel and pilgrimage literature
• Medieval maps, geographical writing, place and space, literary geographies
• Spatial humanities (including digital)
• Reception studies methodologies for medieval texts

Current research

My research interests include: medieval forms of spatial representation, with particular reference to travel writing and cartography and a side-interest in digital methodologies; contacts between the Latin West and non-Christian cultures in the late Middle Ages and their cultural impact; medieval pilgrimage and pilgrimage accounts; medieval European literary and imaginative geographies; reception studies; medieval books, readers, and reading. You can hear me talking about India’s most Famous mythological emperor, Prester John, on In Our Time (4 June 2015). I've also blogged about about Where Were the Middle Ages for the Public Medievalist, and about digital approaches to exploring pilgrimage texts for the Pilgrims’ Libraries Network.

My most recent articles have focussed particularly on the fifteenth and sixteenth-century reception of late-Medievel Latin versions of medieval Europe's most widely-read and influential travel book: Mandeville's Travels. I've also written on the dynamic relationship between pilgrimage texts and maps and, with the Pelagios team, I have experimented with using the digital methods in the analysis of medieval Jerusalem pilgrimage texts. 

I am currently dividing my time between two major research projects. Continuing my research on Mandeville, I am now investigating the Insular  French text's earliest diffusion in England (with Edward Mills - Exeter and Daria Akhapkina - Warwick). I am working with Felicitas Schmieder (Fernuniversitaet Hagen) and Stefan Schroeder (Helsinki) on an edited volume, Reading Medieval Maps, for the Brill Reading Medieval Sources series. This collection of approximately 40 essays and case studies aims to provide a comprehensive guide to the current state of the field and new directions in research on the production, use and cultural roles of medieval maps. 

Other articles and book chapters in progress and in press include 'Paths and Parchment: Medieval Literary Geographies' in The Routledge Handbook of Literary Geography (eds. Neal Alexander and David Cooper); 'South East Asia' in the Cambridge History of Medieval Travel Writing (ed. Sebastian Sobecki) and 'Mandeville and Pilgrimage' in the Reading Medieval Studies volume on Holy Land Pilgrimage Texts (eds Philip Booth, Mary Boyle, Rodney Aist).  I am also currently developing a larger project on the imaginative geography the British Isles in the later Middle Ages. 

Research projects