Grant will Support Amos Bronner’s Research in Early Medieval Legal Disputes
Amos Bronner, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History, has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for the academic year 2023-2024 to carry out research in Austria while based at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. The research will form the basis of his doctoral dissertation entitled “Frankish Disputing, 750-1000,” which will focus on mechanisms of dispute settlement in early medieval Europe. His project relies on charters (legal and administrative documents) which record legal disputes, and examines the rôles of consensus, coercion, and violence in the Frankish legal system.
The Fulbright fellowship will enable him to do manuscript work, primarily in Vienna and Salzburg, looking at cartularies containing dispute charters (an example of this kind of manuscript is illustrated above: Österreichisches Staatsarchiv HHStA UR AUR 11). He will also use library resources in Austria to work on East Frankish material in his dissertation and its largely German-language historiography. He was also offered a DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst: German Academic Exchange Service) fellowship to Germany, but declined it in favor of the Fulbright.
Amos remarks: “I am honored and very pleased to have been granted a Fulbright award. This will allow me better to pursue my research, enabling me to access manuscripts and other resources housed in Europe, and to work with some of the foremost experts in the field. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Dr. Jennifer Davis for her generosity in guiding me through the Fulbright application process, as well to everyone else who helped me with the application, including Dr. Maximilian Diesenberger, Dr. Andrew Litke, Dr. Katherine Jansen, Dr. Yitzhak Hen, and Dr. Katharina Rudolf.”
Dr. Jennifer Davis, who is director of Amos’s dissertation, adds: “Amos’s success in winning both a Fulbright and a DAAD is such a wonderful achievement, and reflects the quality of his research and all his hard work. I am thrilled that he will have the opportunity to examine some records of dispute in their medieval manuscript form and to learn from Austrian colleagues at the Academy of Sciences, which is a major center of research on the early Middle Ages. I am sure he will represent the US, and CUA, beautifully as a Fulbright scholar.”