Emotions in public

A distinctive feature of life in medieval and early modern Europe was the communal nature of existence: modern ideas of a boundary between public and private were largely non-existent as the entire community shared information in bustling streets and involved itself overtly in the management of households and the policing of behaviour deemed anti-social. In a predominantly illiterate society, entertainment, news and moral lessons were delivered in visual and aural media that encouraged crowds to gather in the town square, church and marketplace. Whether buying goods and services from ambulant vendors in the streets, or watching executions and joining in charivaris (public shaming rituals), crowds regularly formed, producing emotions that need to be considered in their group context. This chapter explores how this ever-present crowd participated emotionally in the many kinds of urban ritual found in early modern Europe, from religious procession to public punishment. It also looks at when the emotions of the crowd could turn to violence, transforming it into the ‘mob’, and threatening those same religious and civic rituals that were supposed to create and reinforce the community. Natalie Zemon Davis noted back in 1973 that ‘the literature on crowds and violence is vast’, and so rather than cover that well-trodden ground, this chapter instead provides where possible an overview of more recent scholarship on early modern urban history that has focused on both spatial dynamics and the study of soundscapes, allowing us to understand how emotions were produced, manipulated and managed on the streets and squares of early modern Europe. ¹