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The Kaiserchronik Project

Mark Chinca and Christopher Young have been awarded funding of c. £950K by the AHRC to produce, with Jürgen Wolf and Jürg Fleischer (both of Marburg), the first ever full edition of the twelfth-century Kaiserchronik. Over five years, they will edit not just the original, twelfth-century version, but also the two major reworkings of it that were made around 1200 and 1250 – testimony to the work’s continuing relevance for a medieval readership. The three versions will be printed side by side, and in order to make the German text accessible to scholars worldwide, it will be accompanied by an English translation, plus full introduction and commentary. As well as the scholarly edition in three volumes, totalling around 1800 pages, the project will produce an inexpensive single-volume edition for student use. Both will appear with de Gruyter in Berlin. The project is also collaborating with the University Library Heidelberg to digitize all the manuscripts and place them on open access as a virtual Kaiserchronik library. This resource, on the model of others already developed by the UB Heidelberg, such as the Virtuelle Klosterbibliothek Lorsch (http://www.bibliotheca-laureshamensis-digital.de) and the digital edition of Thomasin von Zerklaere (http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/wgd/), will guarantee sustained international exposure for the Kaiserchronik and the project.

As well as a number of journal issues, conferences, and impact initiatives aimed at schools and the broader public, the project will offer opportunities for graduate training for PhD students of medieval German and history across the UK. Master classes in paleography will be conducted by Wolf, one of Germany’s leading experts who leads the Handschriftencensus (http://www.handschriftencensus.de), and students will be given bursaries to help complete the transcription phase of the project under his supervision.

Weiterführende Links

Homepage des Projekts: https://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/german/research/kaiserchronik

Kaiserchronik digital: https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/de/kcd/index.html