By the year 650 it is estimated that the ruins of the Colosseum could have held the entire population of the city of Rome twice over, an arresting image described by Shane Bobrycki on the first page of his new book, The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages. If Late Antiquity was an “Age of Crowds,” he asks, what happened next? What happened to the crowd in an era of demographic decline and deurbanization? And what can the transformation of the crowd tell us more broadly about the history of the early Middle Ages? Bobrycki probes these questions and provides much food for thought in this excellent study, focused across western Europe from c. 500-1000.
The monograph’s structure is clear and economical: after a brisk introduction, the first part of the book focuses on “gatherings as physical phenomena,” the second on “crowds as ideas” (13). First, the Roman legacy of the crowd and its importance is established (Chapter 1), before Bobrycki turns to explore “Numbers,” laying out the broad contours of the fundamentally diminished demographic landscape of the early Middle Ages, in which crowds were notably smaller (Chapter 2). We then look at the “gatherings” themselves (a term frequently used in preference to “crowds”) in more detail: first (broadly speaking), at those of the non-elite (Chapter 3) and then of the elite (Chapter 4). Bobrycki then examines the language used to describe crowds, both in Latin and across a range of vernaculars (Chapter 5), before giving an analysis that identifies the patterns discernible across the representations of the crowd in our early medieval sources (Chapter 6), finishing with a concise conclusion.
Various conceptions of the crowd are discussed by Bobrycki in a whistle stop tour in the introduction, but the most important throughout the study is distinction made by Elias Canetti inMasse und Macht of 1960, between “open” versus “closed” crowds, although used with appropriate nuance. In broad strokes, in the early Middle Ages we see far fewer of the “open,” unpredictable, spontaneous crowds that are such a presence in narrative sources from Late Antiquity, and many more of the more orderly, stage-managed “closed gatherings” that were dominated by, or even consisted solely of, members of the early medieval elite. The types of contending, resisting crowd most common in the historiographical imagination are indeed rarely to be found in our period--so rare indeed to be more or less “illegible.” Collective violent resistance was rare in part because it was rare, Bobrycki argues, and so had little chance of success. This does not mean, however, that the non-elite did not gather, and that they could never express agency, nor that “slantwise” resistance was not possible.
Bobrycki elucidates a fascinating range of non-elite gatherings in the countryside as well as in the town. Occasions and instances include gathering for agrarian activity, for group travel, in village councils and sworn organisations, in order to pay taxes and tithes and to swear fealty, as well as in religious contexts. Religious activity, unsurprisingly, provided opportunities for a quite a range of gatherings (seen by Canetti as the quintessential type of “closed” crowd, but with more nuance by Bobrycki). A series of nicely painted vignettes illustrates the variety of dimensions of religious crowds, but certain themes predominate. Crowds demonstrated the power and veracity of the holy, whether cleric or religious, live or dead saint, or indeed relic. In this sense, the crowd had a crucial role as witness and form of legitimation, a key factor in cases of competition or contestation.
This role of the crowd, in providing legitimation, authority, and status, is also fundamental in the case of elite gatherings of various types--from local, ecclesiastical, and royal councils to the more controversial entourages that provided both security and status. Bobrycki makes an astute observation in his discussion here that demonstrates his critical nuance and acumen: “[if] gatherings produced a ‘public sphere’ in the early Middle Ages...it was not the wide-open spaces of debate in Habermasian theory, but a more circumscribed space of deliberation, contestation, and agreement” (105).
When we turn to look in detail at the language of the early medieval crowd, we can understand the twin move away from classical vocabulary toward both a more positive valence on the one hand and a notable decline in differentiation in crowd vocabulary on the other. There are many fewer and less varied words for crowd than in the Roman world, and, for example, aturba ceases to be a troublesome crowd but can just be a large group of people, and indeed areligosa ac felix turba (139). These shifts are readily comprehensible in the context of a profoundly changed crowd “regime.” Furthermore, although the majority of the examples in the book are taken, as Bobrycki freely admits, from Francia and (northern) Italy, this semantic discussion commendably includes a range of vernaculars as well as Latin to demonstrate the widespread and representative nature of this transition. Across this wide linguistic landscape Bobrycki shows how “[c]ollective terms were linked ever more closely with notions of unity, consensus, and legitimacy, ever less with disorder, unrest, and vulgarity” (142). It is not that there were never negative representations of crowds, but these were much less common.
Overall, Bobrycki makes a very good case for the distinctiveness of the “crowd regime” of the early Middle Ages, distinct both from what came before and what would come after (this afterlife being only hinted at in this book). He argues that this helps make the case for the early Middle Ages itself as a distinctive historical period (an argument that readers of the Medieval Review may hopefully need rather less than others). He also, as promised, provides some genuinely interesting nuance to many of our standard assumptions or understandings of the “crowd.”
Bobrycki has written a convincing, thought-provoking, and readable monograph. The main text comes in at 177 pages and one might well have liked to have had more: in particular, although he writes with admirable clarity, Bobrycki sometimes passes rather too swiftly over key terms, concepts, and historiographical discussions, which might have helpfully been discussed at greater length, especially given that this book is likely to appeal to readers outside the boundaries of early medieval history tout court. Some of the concise vignettes in the book might also have profited from being allowed a longer exposition and teasing out.
My only real complaint as regards the book is not the responsibility of the author but falls squarely at the feet of Princeton University Press: in such a scholarly book, replete with rich and wide-ranging footnotes and bibliography, it is particularly unfortunate to have to rely on endnotes, which include all bibliographic details. Moreover, the publishers do not even do the reader the courtesy of providing running headers to tell one what page the endnotes refer back to. This all makes reading the book a less pleasant, and indeed less useful, reading experience than it might otherwise have been. This should not, however, detract unduly from Bobrycki's real achievement.