Professor Marianne O'Doherty

• Medieval travel and pilgrimage literature
• Medieval maps, geographical writing, place and space, literary geographies
• Book history and reception studies methodologies for medieval texts
• Medieval paratexts: prologues, epilogues, marginalia, illustrations

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. 

I have written a series of articles and chapters over the last decade or so focussing on the reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1396), Europe's most popular travel account, in its Latin, French and Middle English versions. My most recent chapters in this field include an article on 'Pilgrimage and the Holy Places in The Book of Sir John Mandeville' (Holy Land Pilgrimage Texts, 300-1550, Brill, forthcoming) and an exploration of Christine de Pizan's treatment of her travel narrative sources in the Chemin de longue étude (Oltre Marco Polo, Ca' Foscari, forthcoming). Co-written chapters on medieval maps and contemporary art, mapping otherness in the Middle Ages, and medieval maps in the archives will also shortly appear in my co-edited volume (with Felicitas Schmieder and Stefan Schröder), Reading Medieval Maps (Brill, forthcoming).

Current projects include research into the sources of Christine de Pizan's terrestrial geography - including her potential knowledge of maps - in the Chemin de longue étude and an exploration of the imaginative geographies of the British Isles before 1500.