The crowd in the early Middle Ages / Shane Bobrycki.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bobrycki, Shane, 1985- author.

Series:

Histories of economic life

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Crowds--History--To 1500.

Crowds.

Collective behavior--To 1500.

Collective behavior.

Physical Description:

xxi, 313 pages ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2024]

Summary:

"Until now, almost all historians have seen the de-urbanized, de-populated early Middle Ages as a crowdless world. But crowds did not disappear in Europe between 500 and 1000, historian Shane Bobrycki shows. The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages is the first book-length study of crowds in post-Roman European history. After fifth- and sixth-century urban and demographic decline, European gatherings were smaller, less spontaneous, and easier for elites and rulers to control. But crowds remained central to the agrarian economy; they played a vital role in politics and religion. Assemblies, festivals, fairs, and the church's invisible multitude of saints ensured that collective behavior remained central to public life. Early medieval women and men sought to recreate and reimagine Rome's lost crowds. Bobrycki demonstrates that between inherited Christian values and new material constraints on gathering, elites abandoned old prejudices against mobs and rabbles while embracing the crowd's legitimacy, with lasting results for European institutions. Non-elites resisted authority by avoiding or repurposing expected collective behaviors. The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages argues that the history of early medieval crowds illuminates the transition from the ancient world to the Middle Ages. Early medieval communities inventively reimagined collective behaviors: taxation, in an age of weak governments, involved controlling seasonal crowds. Enduring religious and political practices, the book argues, had their origins in a forgotten early medieval crowd regime. In the medieval period, elites began to draw distinctions between "good" and "bad" crowds, with good crowds acting as a legitimizing force and bad crowds portrayed as unruly, often female mobs. In this sweeping analysis of European life in the Middle Ages, Bobrycki explores the world shaped by the early medieval crowd regime and encourages historians to rethink their understanding of collective behavior"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

The Early Middle Ages : A World without Crowds?

The Crowd as Historical Subject

The Crowd Regime of the Early Middle Ages

Sources and Structure

1. The Roman Legacy

Crowds in Roman Antiquity

The Crowd from the Republic to the Principate (c. 400 BCE-300 CE)

The Crowd in Late Antiquity (c. 300-600)

Scale

Functions

Ambivalence

The End of the Roman Crowd Regime in the West

The Legacy of Roman Crowds

2. Numbers

Number and Scale

Early Medieval Demography : Evidence, Causes, Trends

Regional Heterogeneity

Population Pools and Carrying Capacities

Sizes of Gatherings

Numbers and Crowds

3. Peasants and Other Non-Elites : Repertory and Resistance

The Problem of Non-Elite Crowds

Peasants: Far from the Madding Crowd?

Horizontal and Vertical Coordination

Spirituality and Recreation

Resistance

Repertory and Resistance

4. The Closed Crowd : Elite Venues and Occasions for Gathering

Predictability, Hierarchy, Unity

Religious Gatherings

Gatherings in "Public" Life

Intra-Elite Competition and Conflict : The Case of Tours

The Solemn Assembly

Ramifications of the Closed Crowd

5. Words

Semantic History

Crowds across Languages

Blurring Distinctions : Populus

Christianization: Contio

Erosion of Negative Connotations : Turba

Crowd Words Transformed

6. Representations

Patterns of Representation

Topoi, Type Scenes, and Their Sources

Qualities of the Crowd in Early Medieval Discourse

Crowds and Sanctity

The Crowd as Witness

Bad Crowds

Epilogue : Into the Eleventh Century

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780691189697

0691189692

OCLC:

1420339597