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For its analysis and annotation (over a third of the text is endnotes), this book is sure to become the starting point for advanced students and scholars wanting to understand gatherings in Western and Central Europe between 500 and 1000 CE. An introduction discusses the different scholarly methods employed in understanding "the crowd" (psychological, socioeconomic, cultural, demographic, and political), before outlining Bobrycki's aim of surveying, both diachronically and synchronically, early medieval gatherings. Subsequent chapters explore the two major approaches taken: understanding crowds as both physical and semantic phenomena. Bobrycki (Univ. of Iowa) achieves the former by explicating a wide variety of sources, including textual (hagiography, chronicles, and polyptychs), archaeological, artistic, and computational philological. Understanding the words used, as well as their representational patterns (topoi and type scene), forms the second part of the study. The picture that emerges is of an early medieval society whose reduced population and deurbanized structure resulted in crowds different from both their Roman precedents and later medieval counterparts. Crowds--whether of elites or non-elites--participated in gatherings that were smaller, mostly (but not always) passive, and less spontaneous as both secular and ecclesiastical officials organized their summoning and direction.

Historians often prefer to conduct archival research rather than ruminate on the role of theory in their work, but Sager (Univ. of Victoria, Canada), who also wrote Inequality in Canada (CH, Oct'21, 59-0552), urges historians to think of history as "a way of seeing ... an active discipline of the mind" (p. 21). In this brief yet wide-ranging and thought-provoking book, he explores the logic historians use, often unawares, in their work: e.g., examining the relation between parts and wholes, consilience, perspectives, analogies, quantification, and abductive reasoning. Sager argues, pace Sam Wineburg, that this logic has much in common with other disciplines. His well-written book is rich with insights, many of which even led this reviewer to reconsider ideas about history as a discipline. Although Sager convincingly argues that historical thinking shares much in common with other disciplines, he does not spend as much time discussing what features are unique to it, and this reviewer would have appreciated further clarity as to what sets history apart. Even so, this excellent book would be an ideal guide for first-year graduate students and a useful reminder for their professors.Summing Up: Essential. Graduate students and faculty.