dr. Marianne Ritsema van Eck, MA

Marianne Ritsema van Eck is assistant professor in medieval history.

She specializes in cultural and religious history of the late medieval and early modern period. Areas of expertise include Franciscan studies, the cult of the saints, pilgrimage and travel, historical cartography, and Italian sacri monti (holy mountains). Marianne defended her PhD dissertation at the University of Amsterdam in June 2017. Her first book, The Holy Land in Observant Franciscan Texts (Brill 2019), analyses the development of the complex Observant Franciscan engagement with the Holy Land during the early modern period. Marianne is developing a second book project about Franciscan sacri monti in Italy (c. 1250-1700).

Before coming to VU Amsterdam, Marianne taught medieval history at Leiden University (2018-2021), and worked as postdoctoral research fellow at the Norwegian Institute in Rome (2021-2023), developing the project St Helena and the city of Rome: re-inventing the late antique Christian past in early modernity (c. 1450-1650). She remains connected to the Norwegian Institute in Rome as honorary fellow. She is also a fellow of the HDC Centre for Religious History.

About my research

The overarching theme which unites my research interests are the cultural frameworks which govern knowledge transfer in historical engagements with the sacred past, and the implicated religious identities. My project on St Helena and the city of Rome investigates how and why Empress Helena Augusta (c. 250-330 CE) became a universally venerated saint in early modern Global Catholicism, through a meandering trajectory from local cults in the Carolingian diocese of Reims, to late medieval Rome. I chart the development of the Roman Helena cult by assessing how history was re-imagined through a complex cross-fertilization between stories, iconic objects (relics), and locations.

In connection to this, I have become interested in Heritage as a methodological instrument for historians of premodernity, as a heuristic for analyzing complex engagement with the past through a wide array of textual and material sources involved in my Helena-project. This interest has also resulted in an interdisciplinary conference on The Longue Durée of Cultural Heritage: Curation of the Past from Antiquity to the Present Day in December 2022, co-organized with colleagues at the Norwegian Institute in Rome. I am also interested in the  role of mobility and materiality in the creation of (trans)regional sacred landscapes, which I developed by organizing the conference Hagioscape! in May 2023.

In addition, I work on the Franciscan order, a large international pre-modern religious NGO. My monograph (Brill, 2019) analyses the complex Observant Franciscan engagement with the Holy Land, demonstrating how the order used learned historio-geographical publishing to buttress their position in competitive, globalizing contexts. Hence, I now aim to investigate this order’s massive, but understudied published output from 1450 CE onward, which is increasingly becoming accessible due to digitization.

Meanwhile, I am developing my second monograph on Franciscan Holy Mountains in Italy (c. 1250-1700), in which I reorient the vibrant scholarship on these sanctuaries, typically seen as a Northern-Italian phenomenon of the Catholic Reformation. By including crucial Tuscan sites and steering clear of one-dimensional accounts of Franciscan understandings of nature, I approach the topic from the angle of green heritage to analyze the complex conception of environmental sanctity informing these sites, which are simultaneously powerful representations of the foundational phase of the order.

Teaching

As a lecturer I enjoy enthusing students for working with visual, material, and literary sources for cultural and religious history of medieval and early modern Europe in a meaningful and methodologically sound way. By reframing potential hurdles – cultural, linguistic, paleographical, etc. – I make working with premodern sources as accessible as possible. My teaching is source-oriented, focused on engaging directly with the physical objects (including texts), places, and spaces themselves, including visits to heritage locations and institutions (special collections, archives, museums, etc.). At the same time, the methodological frameworks that guide my ongoing research interest also animate the direction of my teaching activities, exploring with students the sacred space, materiality, mobility, etc.

Courses taught at VU Amsterdam:

• European history 500-1500 (course coordinator).
• Elementary Latin I & II
• Key texts in HIS (course coordinator).
• BA thesis colloquium HIS.
• History of Knowledge (2023-24).
• Onderzoekscollege Cultuur, Religie en Kennis 500-1800 (cursus coördinator).

Courses taught at Amsterdam University College:

• Early to Modern History (2023-24).

Find me on: linkedin, academia.edu.

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