The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages

“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”–