 Murdoch's earliest work is concerned with the "Altdeutsche Genesis" and other German Adam Books, later exploring the same theme in other vernaculars.In several hundred published works he established the centrality of the "popular" (as opposed to the exegetical) understanding of the "protoplasts" in far wider areas of medieval thought than had hitherto been appreciated.He demonstrated that an awareness of Adam motifs allows an entirely new reading of some of the classics of medieval literature, most notably Hartmann's "Gregorius".