Please note the new date of 2/17 at 5:30pm via Zoom
'LIKE LOCUSTS IN THEIR MULTITUDE’: THE MULTIPLYING GAZE IN EARLY MEDIEVAL SOURCES
Shane Bobrycki, University of Vienna (Austria)
What does the numerousness of a people signify? It can be good to be numberless, like the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore. Early medieval propagandists across regions, religions, and cultures prided themselves on being as countless as Abraham’s seed. But innumerability could also be a means of discrediting a people or a group. Ninth- and tenth-century Franks likened “Greeks,” “Northmen,” “Magyars,” and “Saracens” to forests, droves, and swarms. When an Umayyad ambassador visited the Slavs, he was sure they were the most numerous people on earth. Byzantine writers likened Latin Westerners on Crusade to locusts. This talk explores the stakes of the multiplying gaze across early medieval societies. What made phobic innumerability so durable as a strategy of delegitimation? In what ways did this strategy, common in so many times and places, manifest itself distinctly in the early medieval West?
