In Rome, it was the plebs; in the Revolution, the sans-culotte. But the centuries in between seem sparse—a world without crowds, stretches of land punctuated every now and then by the solitary peasant.
But in his new book, Shane Bobrycki argues that 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: these were the gatherings where power was negotiated between the mass and the elite. Bobrycki asks: what happened when demographic realities shifted, but culture, religion, and politics remained bound by the past?
To discuss the history of crowds between the age of circuses and the age of crusades, we were honoured to welcome Shane Bobrycki, assistant professor of history at the University of Iowa and author of The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2025).
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