Professor Mark Chinca

Mark Chinca studied in Cambridge and Kiel and is a specialist in medieval literature with a comparative focus on German, Romance, and Latin. His primary research interests are in rhetoric, poetics, and metaphor; the literature of death and dying in medieval and early modern Europe; the formation of vernacular textual culture in the Middle Ages.

From 2012 to 2018 he directed the Kaiserchronik project together with Christopher Young; this was a collaboration by teams based at the universities of Cambridge, Marburg, and Heidelberg to produce a digital edition of one of the first vernacular verse chronicles in its various manuscript versions. More recently completed projects include Meditating Death (2020), a study of devotional practice and how it was shaped by written textuality before and after the Protestant Reformation, and Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages (2022), a collective literary history which asks how vernacular textual cultures began and what processes of consolidation and institutionalization had to be complete before we can speak meaningfully of “literature” in any given language. A further collection, Unlikening Translation (2025), explores the potential of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Task of the Translator” for understanding the many kinds of linguistic and nonlinguistic transfer that went by the name translatio in the Middle Ages.

Currently Mark holds a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust and is working on The Formation of Medieval German Literature. The project investigates the multiple and cumulative beginnings of traditions of textual practice in the German-speaking world over a long timespan between the eighth and thirteenth centuries.