The Patarin moment in Milan's pre-communist history (1056-1075) is described in the major sources of the event as a time of great emotion, attributed by the authors to the Patarin chieftains or to the people on the move. Although the word does not yet exist, a varied vocabulary describes the emotions; the fact of being moved and moved by emotion is well represented by the term commovere and all its forms. Using this vocabulary as a starting point, and the presence of shared emotion, we can ask a question that is a hot topic in the social sciences: does collective emotion exist, and if so, how can we grasp it? What characterizes it, if we strip it of the layers of ideological supposition that have elevated it to a social science concept while inheriting all the attributes of a discourse of the literate elite, frightened of crowds for very long centuries? If it is most often assigned, is it possible to identify in collective emotion elements other than those attributed by the elites, in the sources? This Milan survey, preceded by a general introduction to the seminar as a whole, will be discussed and extended.
