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- The crowd in the early Middle Ages / by Bobrycki, Shane,1985-author;
Includes bibliographical references and indexThe 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"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"--- Subjects: Crowds; Collective behavior;
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