Marianne Ritsema van Eck

Marianne Ritsema van Eck is an Assistant Professor in Medieval History at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, specializing in cultural and religious history of the late medieval and early modern period. Her academic journey includes teaching at Leiden University (2018-2021) and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Norwegian Institute in Rome (2021-2023), where she continues as an honorary fellow. She is also affiliated with the HDC Centre for Religious History.

Her research centers on cultural frameworks governing knowledge transfer regarding sacred pasts and religious identities. Key projects include her work on St. Helena and Rome, examining how Empress Helena became a universally venerated saint in early modern Global Catholicism, and her second book project on Franciscan sacri monti in Italy (c. 1250-1700), which reorients scholarship on these sanctuaries by including crucial Tuscan sites and analyzing environmental sanctity. She has organized significant interdisciplinary conferences on heritage and sacred landscapes, and her work on Franciscan Holy Land engagement demonstrates how the order used historio-geographical publishing to buttress their position in competitive contexts.

Ritsema van Eck's scholarly output reveals consistent focus on Franciscan studies, sacred landscapes, and the interplay between textual and material culture. Her work spans diverse subfields including relic mobility, hagiography, historical cartography, and the role of materiality in creating transregional sacred landscapes. She approaches these topics through innovative methodological frameworks that bridge heritage studies with premodern historical analysis.

Among her notable scientific contributions is her monograph The Holy Land in Observant Franciscan Texts (Brill, 2019), which analyzes the complex Observant Franciscan engagement with the Holy Land. She has also co-organized influential conferences including The Longue Durée of Cultural Heritage (2022) and Hagio-Scape! How mobility and materiality shaped pre-modern geographies of devotion (2023).

In teaching, Ritsema van Eck emphasizes source-oriented engagement with visual, material, and literary sources for medieval and early modern European cultural and religious history. She coordinates multiple courses including European History 500-1500, History of Knowledge, and Elementary Latin, while also incorporating heritage site visits into her pedagogy. Her teaching philosophy focuses on making premodern sources accessible while addressing cultural, linguistic, and paleographical challenges.