Shane Bobrycki's "The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages"

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

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages, and reported the following:

The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages is about people holding onto something lost. It asks what happens to collective behavior — crowds, protests, riots, gatherings, assemblies — in an age of demographic decline (the ancient/medieval transition). Europe in the period c. 500–1000 CE was thinly populated, but deeply engaged with the more populous Roman past, in which crowds were a regular part of life. So the book is all about the ways early medieval Europeans did or didn’t hold onto crowds as they existed in the days of gladiators and circuses. Page 99 turns out to be pretty representative. It discusses churches as a venue for gatherings.

Churches were special spaces in early medieval Europe. Not only were they imbued with religious significance in a largely Christian world, they were bigger and more solidly built than most buildings (homes, work spaces, granaries, etc.). They had their own distinctive feel, light, smell, and look. Their interiors were divided up by means of columns, curtains, chancels, and other separating structures. So human bodies could be organized hierarchically in them: men here, women there; the poor here, elites there; lay people here, clerics there. Such divvied-up spaces fostered a sense of grandeur: in small spaces, fewer people feel more numerous.

Page 99 also gives the counter-example of churches in Rome. Once the greatest metropolis of the ancient world, Rome had shrunk from around 1,000,000 inhabitants (first or second century CE) to perhaps 500,000 inhabitants (fifth century CE) to only around 30,000 inhabitants for most of the period discussed by the book. Whereas the old entertainment facilities (Colosseum, Circus Maximus) tended to be cannibalized for parts or reused (as with the Colosseum) for housing, the huge churches of the fifth century retained their function. Here the effect was different: “Small crowds in huge spaces can experience effects no less profound than large crowds in small ones.”

So the Page 99 Test works pretty well. This page expresses an important argument of the book, which is that crowds did not disappear in the early medieval world, but did change in form and function. One reflection of this is that the crowd served the interests of the powerful more often than of the powerless. The church crowd is a quintessential example of this “early medieval crowd regime.” As for (rare) peasant rebellions and (frequent) non-elite refusals to participate in elite gatherings, you’d have to crack open different pages!

Learn more aboutThe Crowd in the Early Middle Ages at Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue