Trinity College
Cambridge
CB2 1TQ
United Kingdom
Mark Chinca is a specialist in medieval literature with comparative interests across German, Romance, and Latin. He studied in Cambridge and Kiel and received his PhD in medieval German literature from Cambridge.
Postgraduate and undergraduate:
- Medieval and early modern German literature
- Comparative medieval literature
Undergraduate:
- German historical linguistics
Mark Chinca has supervised MPhil and PhD dissertations in medieval German literature and welcomes inquiries from students with research projects in this area.
- The language of medieval literature, especially questions of fiction, rhetoric, and metaphor
- Courtly literature
- Religious and devotional writing
- Kaiserchronik
- Literary history of the Middle Ages
Between 2012 and 2017 Mark Chinca was co-recipient of an AHRC Research Grant for “Kaiserchronik: Literature and History in Medieval Germany.” This project, also supported by the Isaac Newton Trust and Schröder Fund, was a collaboration between teams in Cambridge, Marburg, and Heidelberg to make a digital edition of the Kaiserchronik (2018), a mid twelfth-century chronicle of Roman and German history and one of the first verse histories written in any European vernacular.
Two other recently completed projects have a comparative focus. Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages (2022), the product of a series of colloquia held in Cambridge and Princeton, is a collective history of the emergence of written literatures in the vernacular languages of medieval Europe. Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing (2020) is a study of how writing and textuality shaped one of the most influential forms of meditation in the devotional cultures of Western European Christianity before as well as after the Reformation.
Current work explores the presence of French in German courtly literature, likeness and metaphor in the writings of the fourteenth-century mystic Heinrich Seuse, and the poetry of failure in the Tristan romance by Gottfried von Strassburg.
Recent publications include:
- Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages. Edited by Mark Chinca and Christopher Young. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
- Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing: From Bonaventure to Luther. Oxford University Press, 2020.
- Kaiserchronik. Elektronische Ausgabe. Edited by Mark Chinca, Helen Hunter, Jürgen Wolf, Christopher Young. Heidelberg: Universitätsbibliothek, 2018.
For a complete list of publications see here.
