Introduction Enter the Crowd

The article focuses on the multifaceted connections between communication and the crowd in early modern English literature, language and culture. London featured as a protagonist in many of the papers we heard, a selection of which makes up this volume: indeed, John Stow’s Survey of London (1598) provides a narrative of a crowded city whose identity was being shaped by masses of people arriving from outside the city boundaries. In the early modern period, the crowd seems to be associated with contradictory ideas of uniformity and disorder, coherence and monstrosity, and with potential sovereignty. It embodies a cultural space of variability and instability, reflecting contemporary social and political anxieties. In a context shaped by urgent nationalistic political agendas, public communication and rhetoric played a vital role: investigating the nexus between communication and the crowd meant exploring arenas of debate and political control, representations of collective identities and leadership, but also networks of relationships.