To complete research for and write a monograph entitled 'The Indies and the Medieval West: Thought, Report, Imagination' (Turnhout: Brepols, due 2012)

When Vasco da Gama's ships, the first to take the sea route from Portugal to India, arrived in 1497 in Calicut on the South-West coast of India, a member of his crew is famously said to have explained the mission as a quest for 'Christians and Spices'. Scholars have often interpreted this as a moment of extraordinary intersection between literary history and the history of discovery. Portuguese expectations of what they would find in mainland India and the Indian Ocean World were formed, the story goes, by legends of Christians, spices and glorious wealth retold down the centuries. Seduced by stories of St Thomas's mission in India, the legendary Priest-King Prester John of the Three Indies, and of the fabulous wealth and spices of India, the Portuguese misread myth and imaginative literature for truth, with serendipitous (for Europeans) results.

The seductive myth of serendipitous discovery brought about by myth and legend has until now proven stubbornly resistant to investigation. Yet some facts within the narrative strike discordant notes. Portuguese vessels used in Vasco da Gama's expedition were specially-designed hybrids, reinforced to enable them to carry cannon. Vasco's da Gama's maritime mission to Calicut was also not the first by the Portuguese; it followed a secret overland one by Pêro da Covilhã, disguised as a Muslim - a disguise which in itself suggests some prior knowledge of the political configuration of the Indian Ocean World trading region. Whereas Portuguese self-representations paint Western Europeans as innocent seekers after myth and legend, their actions show them as canny manipulators, informed by careful research, and better prepared for hostilities than for diplomacy.

This anecdote should warn us that there is a gap between what, in this period leading up to European political ascendancy in the Indian Ocean world, western Europeans wrote about the region, about their intentions and desires towards it, and the kinds of activities that they undertook there. This monograph investigates that gap. It will show that fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Western Europeans had access to detailed and recent accounts of India, the Indian Ocean World and the Far East, and that these accounts were widely copied, read and used across Europe, but for different reasons among different audiences. The book will describe what was done with Medieval Western European accounts of the Indian Ocean World, setting out how and why knowledge of the Indian Ocean World was circulated, manipulated, deployed, concealed, and made strategically useful within Medieval Europe.

As part of its investigation, the book will look in detail at the kinds of writing and other forms of representation of the Indian Ocean World that circulated in late-Medieval Europe. Textual representations influenced literature, art, and cartography, and were read by clerics, laypeople, merchants, nobles, administrators, missionaries and scholars. But reading is something that happens in real places and circumstances in the world: in monastic libraries; at court; in a shop; alone; in a group; in periods of militant Christian or aggressive mercantile expansion; in periods of fear of political or religious 'others'. This book will show how these circumstances and situations affected the way texts were read and used. What did real medieval readers know and believe about the Indian Ocean world? How did they use their knowledge? How did political and social changes shape these representations and uses? How did these representations shape their political, social, cultural and economic environments? In short, this book will examine the role of geographical knowledge in the making of self and community, in ratifying or shaking up one's own religious and cultural assumptions, and in preparing for, inspiring and justifying action.

The goal of the proposed research is intellectual and cultural impact: to push back the boundaries of knowledge in its field and to improve and nuance the cultural and historical narratives that create and divide communities. This research aims to contribute to a significant improvement in public understanding not just of the medieval world, but of the direct and relevant ways in which the past speaks to the present.

1. Who will benefit from the research?
The book will make original research available directly to the wider public. It will also make the original research available to writers of synthetic works and popular histories in print and other formats. Research will be disseminated through contacts with relevant organisations in the heritage sector, notably Southampton's Maritime and Sea City museums, and the National Maritime Museum, whose Indian Ocean Worlds galleries are due to open in 2012.

2. How will they benefit?
Through a better level of general knowledge and understanding of an interconnected, inter-cultural medieval past, and the ways in which it has influenced and continues to speak to an international, inter-cultural present.

3. What will be done to ensure that they benefit?
a) I propose to offer an open lecture, tailored to non-specialists at the Southampton Sea City Museum (due to open 2012), with which Humanities at Southampton is developing strong links, on Europeans' changing views of the Indian Ocean World from the late-medieval to early modern periods.

b) Through Southampton's established links, I will enter into a dialogue with the National Maritime Museum. Possible outcomes include a public lecture co-organised with the Museum and promotion of the monograph through the NMM bookshop.

c) The first port of call for members of the general public seeking information on any topic is now the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. Unfortunately, this online encyclopaedia is notoriously outdated and unreliable. I will update and correct Wikipedia entries on the key travellers, texts, cartographers, maps categories and concepts touched upon in my study so that they both reflect and act as portals to my own and peers' latest research in the field. This will help to bridge the existing gulf between scholarly and popular approaches to both the medieval period and the Indian Ocean region.

d) I will collaborate with the University of Southampton's Strategic Research Group in Maritime Studies to reach, through its networks, those engaged in Maritime Studies beyond the Humanities and the University's external stakeholders.

e) As much of the final monograph as can be legally made digitally available, in agreement with the publishers, will be made universally available through the University of Southampton's e-prints online library (http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/).