The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages

Dr. Shane Bobrycki

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Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Princeton University Press
01 April 2025

European history; Medieval history; Social & cultural history; Social, group or collective psychology

Series: Histories of Economic Life

The importance of collective behavior in early medieval Europe.

By the fifth and sixth centuries, the bread and circuses and triumphal processions of the Roman Empire had given way to a quieter world. And yet, as Shane Bobrycki argues, the influence and importance of the crowd did not disappear in early medieval Europe. In The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages, Bobrycki shows that although demographic change may have dispersed the urban multitudes of Greco-Roman civilisation, collective behaviour retained its social importance even when crowds were scarce.

Most historians have seen early medieval Europe as a world without crowds. In fact, Bobrycki argues, early medieval European sources are full of crowds

although perhaps not the sort historians have trained themselves to look for. Harvests, markets, festivals, religious rites, and political assemblies were among the gatherings used to regulate resources and demonstrate legitimacy. Indeed, the refusal to assemble and other forms of 'slantwise' assembly became a weapon of the powerless. Bobrycki investigates what happened when demographic realities shifted, but culture, religion, and politics remained bound by the past. The history of crowds during the five hundred years between the age of circuses and the age of crusades, Bobrycki shows, tells an important story

one of systemic and scalar change in economic and social life and of reorganisation in the world of ideas and norms.

By: Dr. Shane Bobrycki
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9780691189697
ISBN 10: 0691189692
Series: Histories of Economic Life
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 01 April 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Shane Bobrycki is assistant professor of history at the University of Iowa.

Reviews for The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages

""Bobrycki has devoted himself to a blessedly old-fashioned kind of scholarship, digging through ever-finer shades of meaning, sifting through all the Latin terms that refer to crowds and mobs and gatherings. If you have long wanted to discern the subtle differences in medieval Europe between vulgus, plebs, turba, populus, and rustici, here at last is the book to assist you. And these differences do indeed have weight and significance.""---Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker