Current Project
'Landscapes of Normans: Ways of Seeing.' Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship 1 Sept 2023-31 August 2025
This interdisciplinary project uses chronicles from Normandy, England, Southern Italy and the Holy Land to show how medieval historians understood and used the landscape, both real and imagined, to create narratives about the past and to shape identities through a shared historical culture. From the beginning of the eleventh century to roughly the mid-twelfth century, the activities of the Normans in these four geographical areas inspired a collection of chronicles and biographies that reflected these peoples’ migration to and conquest of other lands, the formation of new polities, and the medieval writers’ attitudes towards these developments. Whereas some of these works are closely related, notably the group derived from the original historian of the Normans, Dudo of Saint-Quentin, others, particularly the Southern Italian histories, were independent of each other. This project can, therefore, determine whether there were common ideas circulating in central medieval Europe of how, when and what to write about the landscape derived from a broader shared historical culture that extended beyond a close connection with the Normans. The rise of environmental concerns in recent decades, reflected in the development of environmental humanities and eco-critical approaches to the past more broadly, allows for a sustained analysis not only of the medieval past and the role of the landscape within it, but also how theoretical frameworks that underpin landscape studies have been constructed in the modern world. Phenomenology and psychogeography, more commonly used in archaeology, are key here in foregrounding embodied experience and emotional engagement with the past so opening up an innovative approach to researching narrative sources.
Past Projects
‘Religious Life in Normandy: Space, Gender and Social Pressure' Leonie’s first monograph considered the religious life in Normandy focusing on the day-to-day interaction of the laity, professed religious and the clergy and how this was negotiated through the creation and use of sacred spaces (churches, monasteries and hospitals).
Society and Culture in Medieval Rouen 911-1300 (with Dr Elma Brenner, Wellcome Trust) is an edited collection of essays on the important medieval city of Rouen, the capital of Normandy. It was published by Brepols in 2013.
Journeying Along Medieval Routes (with Dr Alison Gascoigne and Dr Marianne O'Doherty Southampton), is a volume of essays arising from a very successful stand at the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds. This book will enhance our understanding of the experience, conditions, conceptualisation and impact of human movement in western Europe and the Middle East between late antiquity and the thirteenth century.
