Shane Bobrycki
I am a historian of premodern Europe, especially in the first millennium CE. My first book, The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages, studies crowds in the age of their material scarcity in Europe between end of the Roman empire and the recovery of populations and cities by the eleventh century.
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Papers by Shane Bobrycki
Abstract from Medioevo Latino vol. 32 (2011), 1232:
“Il panegirico di Ermoldo Nigello in onore di Ludovico il Pio, scritto come opera risarcitoria per la non meglio specificata colpa che Ermoldo pagò con l'esilio, attraverso la lode dell'imperatore esprime la piena adesione all'ideologia politica carolingia; per riabilitare sé stesso Ermoldo si presenta come umile suddito ma, soprattutto, come utile suddito. La stessa scelta dell'appellativo di nigellus, rimandando al nigra sum sed formosa del Cantico dei Cantici come anche, per contrasto, al ben noto appellativo di albinus di Alcuino, afferma attraverso una retorica dell'umiltà anche le potenzialità del letterato come promotore del sistema dei valori della corte carolingia.”
For full bibliographic information see: http://opac.regesta-imperii.de/lang_de/anzeige.php?buchbeitrag=Nigellus%2C+Ausulus%3A+self-promotion%2C+self-suppression+and+Carolingian+ideology+in+the+poetry+of+Ermold&pk=1526826."
Books by Shane Bobrycki
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 reorganization in the world of ideas and norms.
(1) When gatherings involving marginal social groups (non-elites, women) threatened elite power in eighth- and ninth-century Europe, they did so not by directly confronting elite authority (e.g. mobs attacking bishops), but indirectly, in what anthropologists have called a “slantwise” fashion: by gathering in the wrong way, place, or time (e.g. crowds neglecting their parish church in favour of new relics, depriving church leaders of income through tithes). This is because early medieval governance, lacking strong institutions, relied on predictable, face-to-face gatherings for social order and resource extraction.
(2) Because the crowd in early medieval discourse normally evoked hierarchy and order (Roman words for “riots” now referred to “assemblies” of monks and angels), elite polemics against “slantwise” crowds were also indirect. Like crowd critics later in European history, early medieval elites condemned dangerous crowds using gendered language. But unlike modern theorists who gendered the crowd itself as essentially female, ninth-century ecclesiastical writers used tropes of female (and rustic) manipulability to paint otherwise permissible behaviours (collective worship, almsgiving, penance) as illegitimate.
The article thus questions a widely-held view that the crowd disappeared in the early medieval West, compared both to earlier and later periods of European history and to the contemporary Byzantine and Islamic worlds. That view depends on historiographical assumptions about what counts as a crowd. Early medieval crowds, both as a subject of discourse and a group of practices, were indeed unusual, but they were no less socially central.
Abstract from Medioevo Latino vol. 32 (2011), 1232:
“Il panegirico di Ermoldo Nigello in onore di Ludovico il Pio, scritto come opera risarcitoria per la non meglio specificata colpa che Ermoldo pagò con l'esilio, attraverso la lode dell'imperatore esprime la piena adesione all'ideologia politica carolingia; per riabilitare sé stesso Ermoldo si presenta come umile suddito ma, soprattutto, come utile suddito. La stessa scelta dell'appellativo di nigellus, rimandando al nigra sum sed formosa del Cantico dei Cantici come anche, per contrasto, al ben noto appellativo di albinus di Alcuino, afferma attraverso una retorica dell'umiltà anche le potenzialità del letterato come promotore del sistema dei valori della corte carolingia.”
For full bibliographic information see: http://opac.regesta-imperii.de/lang_de/anzeige.php?buchbeitrag=Nigellus%2C+Ausulus%3A+self-promotion%2C+self-suppression+and+Carolingian+ideology+in+the+poetry+of+Ermold&pk=1526826."
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 reorganization in the world of ideas and norms.
(1) When gatherings involving marginal social groups (non-elites, women) threatened elite power in eighth- and ninth-century Europe, they did so not by directly confronting elite authority (e.g. mobs attacking bishops), but indirectly, in what anthropologists have called a “slantwise” fashion: by gathering in the wrong way, place, or time (e.g. crowds neglecting their parish church in favour of new relics, depriving church leaders of income through tithes). This is because early medieval governance, lacking strong institutions, relied on predictable, face-to-face gatherings for social order and resource extraction.
(2) Because the crowd in early medieval discourse normally evoked hierarchy and order (Roman words for “riots” now referred to “assemblies” of monks and angels), elite polemics against “slantwise” crowds were also indirect. Like crowd critics later in European history, early medieval elites condemned dangerous crowds using gendered language. But unlike modern theorists who gendered the crowd itself as essentially female, ninth-century ecclesiastical writers used tropes of female (and rustic) manipulability to paint otherwise permissible behaviours (collective worship, almsgiving, penance) as illegitimate.
The article thus questions a widely-held view that the crowd disappeared in the early medieval West, compared both to earlier and later periods of European history and to the contemporary Byzantine and Islamic worlds. That view depends on historiographical assumptions about what counts as a crowd. Early medieval crowds, both as a subject of discourse and a group of practices, were indeed unusual, but they were no less socially central.