This article uses a salient case study (flailing women in ninth-century Dijon, discussed by Amolo of Lyon) to make two related arguments about the unusual nature of crowds in early medieval western Europe:

• (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.

This article examines the word furibum, a medical hapax legomenon in the Vita Barbatiani (B.H.L. 972). Furibum has been enshrined in several dictionaries of medieval Latin as a sort of « litter » for the sick. This article argues that furibum is a transmission error and not a genuine Latin word. The probably tenth-century Vita Barbatiani was modeled on the Latin Miracles of Cyrus and John (B.H.L. 2080), a translation of Sophronios of Jerusalem’s Greek Miracles of Cyrus and John (B.H.G. 477-479i). Furibum likely arose as a misreading of phorium, the Latin Miracles’ Latinization of Sophronios’ φορεῖον (« litter »). Furibum should be removed from the dictionaries, but the history of this error sheds light on the entanglements of cultural transmission across centuries, languages, and regions.

This article examines two panegyrics (praise poems) written for contemporaneous tenth-century rulers, Æthelstan (Athelstan, Aethelstan) of Anglo-Saxon England and ‘Abd al-Rahman III (‘Abd ar-Rahman, Abderraman), first amir then caliph of Umayyad Spain. The paper treats an anonymous praise poem for Æthelstan, "Carta dirige gressus," which portrays the Anglo-Saxon king as a Carolingian-style emperor of all Britain, and the historical urjuza of Ibn ‘Abd Rabbihi (Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih, Ibn ‘Abdrabbih), which recounts ‘Abd al-Rahman III’s military and political successes. The article argues that praise poetry is important in legitimating ideological novelties, but that clever panegyrists often created a space for themselves in the ideological webs they wove for their innovating rulers. Thus Ibn ‘Abd Rabbihi especially linked the glory of caliphal power to a caliph's generosity toward praise poets like himself.

Treats the ninth-century Carolingian panegyrist Ermold Nigellus (aka Ermoldus Nigellus, Ermold the Black, Ermold le Noir, Ermoldo Nigello). In the late 820s, Ermold wrote a four-book panegyric in elegiac couplets to honor emperor Louis the Pious (r. 813-840), ostensibly to attain release from his exile. Argues that Ermold inserts himself into his poetry to remind his royal patrons of his usefulness as a propagandist, while carefully emphasizing his un-threatening status by rhetorical self-deprecation. Ermold balances between self-promotion and self-deprecation, as can be seen even in his sobriquet Nigellus (“little black one”), which may serve as a humble self-comparison to the famous poet and scholar Alcuin, who was known as Albinus (“the white”). Ermold’s authorial strategies shed light on the formation of Carolingian ideology by panegyric, which promotes rulers while allowing the promoters to benefit from their work.