Adam Gopnik writes about crowds for the New Yorker (archived); the topic is interesting in general (and I really have to get around to reading Canetti), but this is the Hattic bit:
In his new book, “The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages” (Princeton), Shane Bobrycki, a medieval historian at the University of Iowa, describes a hinge moment in the way people have thought about crowds. It was a period when the rapid de-urbanization of society had reduced or eliminated the Roman vulgus, or mob, but when memories of Roman order and disorder lingered. 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. It’s fascinating to learn how, when the vulgus was forced out of the dying cities and into the countryside, it became the rustici—the peasants with pitchforks. Plebs, meaning, in classical Latin, “common folk,” came to mean, more neutrally, “the community.” Bobrycki assures us, “Even vulgus could be just another equivalent of the broad populus that was now the lodestar of all crowd words.”
I’m sure there are nits to be picked, so pick away!
I particularly remember the crowd scene/mass orgy in ‘Perfume’.
Of course now I can’t find the book to check how many words for crowds/mobs/gatherings — but they’d have been in German.
Surely rustici does not mean “mob” or “gathering” at all.
You can be a rusticus all by yourself.
Sure, you could have a mob/gathering of rustici; but then you could have a gathering of Romani, too.
Or did the word get that sense in mediaeval Latin?
David E:
No smoking-gun evidence in Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus that rustici served as a noun akin to vulgus, but make what you will of the entry for rusticus:
Grammar: (adj.)
* ordinaire, habituel – plain – gewöhnlich .
Quis etiam hoc meritis beati viri non adscribat, … rusticam multitudinem in flumine transeundo impeditam et periculum et necem evasisse? Alpert. Mett. , Div., lib. 1 c. 16, ed. Van Rij , p. 36.
“Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo ipse domi, simul ac nummos contemplar in arca”, from Horace’s first satire, quoted in A Study in Scarlet — that came to mind. For some reason I’d remembered turba instead of populus.
I might have crossed wires with the text of the Play of Daniel, “turba virilis et puerilis contio plaudit”: turba has positive connotations there. Bobrycki’s book (searcheable in GB) talks about contio as well.
You might want to think about denying an assistant professor their book royalties, but, as often happens, The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages was originally Bobrycki’s dissertation at Harvard, whose full text should be available there.
For some reason I’d remembered turba instead of populus.
And let us not forget that turba also means “turf” or “peat”, media latinitate.
“The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages was originally Bobrycki’s dissertation at Harvard, whose full text should be available there.”
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Widener Library indeed holds both the dissertation as accepted and the version later published.
https://hollis.harvard.edu/primo-explore/search?query=any,contains,The%20Crowd%20in%20the%20Early%20Middle%20Ages&tab=books&search_scope=default_scope&vid=HVD2&lang=en_US&offset=0
Rusticus is the name of one of Horace’s Two Roman Mice. (AbeBooks claims there are several first editions available for sale.)
My brother is one of many many academics who turned his dissertation (found tolerable enough to give him his doctorate in 1999) into a book (published in 2005 by a reputable/prestigious university press not affiliated with either the university that gave him the doctorate or the university that subsequently employed him and eventually tenured him), but that process required more editing/reworking/rewriting of the MS than an outsider might have supposed.
when a dissertation book is about something i’m excited about, it’s usually been worthwhile to read both: the dissertation often covers more ground and gets into exciting semi-digressions; the book often goes deeper into the core topic, with the benefit of more (re)thinking.
Let’s also not forget that mob itself is a shortening of mōbile vulgus (“fickle and inconstant crowd”). (We’d expect the New Yorker piece to note that, right? O tempora …)
…o mōbiles?
“a reputable/prestigious university press not affiliated with either the university that gave him the doctorate or the university that subsequently employed him and eventually tenured him”
Do people have an expectation that it would be otherwise? I’m not sure it had crossed my mind until now that there would be any reason to pick your press based on your institutional affiliation.
I don’t know about the book, but *rustici* as such appears once in the dissertation (leaving aside quotations), but “rusticity” as a more general concept in the connotations of crowd-words seems to come up a fair bit. Either something has changed in the book, or the reviewer has conflated the more general thematic question of rusticity (obviously important in a de-urbanized context) with the discussion of more specifically crowd-denoting words.