The Edge of the World

by Michael Pye

Overview

Saints and spies, pirates and philosophers, artists and intellectuals: they all criss-crossed the grey North Sea in the so-called “dark ages,” the years between the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of Europe’s mastery over the oceans. Now the critically acclaimed Michael Pye reveals the cultural transformation sparked by those men and women: the ideas, technology, science, law, and moral codes that helped create our modern world. This is the magnificent lost history of a thousand years. It was on the shores of the North Sea where experimental science was born, where women first had the right to choose whom they married; there was the beginning of contemporary business transactions and the advent of the printed book. In The Edge of the World, Michael Pye draws on an astounding breadth of original source material to illuminate this fascinating region during a pivotal era in world history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781605986999
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	04/15/2015
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Michael Pye is the author of The Drowning Room, The Pieces from Berlin, and The Edge of the World, all three of which were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. He lives in Amsterdam.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 The invention of money 27

2 The book trade 48

3 Making enemies 69

4 Settling 96

5 Fashion 123

6 Writing the law 140

7 Overseeing nature 169

8 Science and money 192

9 Dealers rule 220

10 Love and capital 242

11 The plague laws 268

12 The city and the world 289

References 329

Acknowledgements 377

Index 381

Editorial Reviews

Michael Pye's new book is bristling, wide-ranging and big-themed. It's the sort of historical work whose thesis is virtually impossible to prove, but it's also a reminder that history isn't an exact science. At its most meaningful, history involves a good deal of art and storytelling. Pye's book is full of both…He has embarked on a fruitful way of reorienting our thinking about the past. By bringing back to life a mostly forgotten cast of medieval shippers, marauders, thinkers and tinkerers, he challenges us to consider how we got to be where—and who—we are.

The New York Times Book Review - Russell Shorto

02/09/2015
Pye (The Pieces from Berlin) takes readers on a far-ranging tour of Europe during the Dark Ages, looking at how civilization developed and evolved through the cultures “around the North Sea in times when water was the easiest way to travel, when the sea connected and carried peoples, belief and ideas, as well as pots and wine and coal.” His style is leisurely yet authoritative, scholarly but engaging; his approach resembles that of a docent leading a group through a vast museum, with each section devoted to a different aspect of society. Pye looks at the establishment of money and currency, the rise of books and written knowledge, the vagaries of fashion and the progress of law, and the clash of cultures and societies. It’s a series of broad topics, condensed into an entertaining—though unfocused—attempt to convey the true wealth of cultural growth during a commonly misunderstood era. In particular, he reveals how the Vikings “had adjusted reality all round the North Sea” in their travels, raids, and resettlements. This is an eye-opening reexamination of the era, and delightfully accessible. Agent: Irene Skolnick, Irene Skolnick Literary Agency. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Mr. Pye draws on a dizzying array of documentary and archaeological scholarship, which he works together in surprising ways. Mr. Pye advances on several fronts at once, following the overlapping currents of customary, religious and empirical ways of thinking. He writes about difficult concepts with vivid details and stories, often jump-cutting from exposition to drama like a film. It’s complicated, but fun.

The Economist

No more of the tired old attribution of europe’s glories to italian city states or germanic empires; it’s around the shore of the North Sea that Michael Pye sees the slow but decisive emergence of our modern world. Utterly readable.

Neal Ascherson

A closely-researched and fascinating characterization of the richness of life and the underestimated interconnections of the peoples all around the medieval and early modern North Sea. A real page-turner.

Chris Wickham

Beautifully written and thoughtfully researched. For anyone, like this reviewer, who is tired of medieval history as a chronicle of kings and kingdoms, knights and ladies, monks and heretics, The Edge of the World provides a welcome respite.

The Wall Street Journal

A double pleasure, first for its unique, illuminating vision of a time largely unknown and misunderstood by modern readers, but even more for its exemplary prose. Pye’s writing is vigorous and precise, the work of a writer who revels in his subject and who nurses a fondness for its many curious byways and paradoxes.

Dallas Morning News

It is the measure of Pye’s achievement that he can breathe life into the traders of seventh-century Frisia or the beguines of late-medieval Flanders as well as into his more celebrated subjects. Hugely enjoyable. Grey the waters of the North Sea may be; but Pye has successfully dyed them with a multitude of rich colors.

The Guardian

Michael Pye has a great journalist's eye for a story and the telling anecdote as well as a great historian's ability to place it in the bigger picture. Here he fuses those talents in a hugely eclectic study of the very first stirrings of modernity in northern Europe.

Alexander McCall Smith

For more than a millennium, the North Sea was our trading floor and our internet. Yet this connection, this period, and this sea remain wrapped in fog. With elegant writing and extraordinary scholarship, Pye does a rare but important thing by focusing not on lands but on the waters that unite them.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Extraordinary. Astonishing. The end result is brilliantly illuminating. Pye’s creativity brings light to this once dark time.

The Times Saturday Review

Persuasive and eloquent. A radical perspective on the modern world. No book I have read has looked at the available evidence in the way it is presented here. A multilayered, complicated, dense book that demands time to be read and be digested but rewards by giving one plenty to chew on.

The Observer (UK)

Excellent. The Edge of the World does what good non-fiction should, in making the reader see the world in a different light.

Scotland on Sunday

From a new perspective on the Vikings to an examination of information as a form of currency, Pye’s book offers an engaging and enlightening look at a little understood time and place.

The Columbus Dispatch

The amazing story of how the North Sea made us who we are. A dazzling historical adventure.

The Daily Telegraph

This is the kind of book that can open up new vistas. An inspiring book, full of surprises.

The Independent

A compelling account of societies around the North Sea will make you see the world in a different light.

The Scotsman

Brilliant. Pye is a wonderful historian . . . bringing history to life like no one else.

Terry Jones

An utterly beguiling journey into the dark ages of the north sea. A complete revelation. Pye writes like a dream. Magnificent.

Jerry Brotton

Persuasive and eloquent. A radical perspective on the modern world. No book I have read has looked at the available evidence in the way it is presented here. A multilayered, complicated, dense book that demands time to be read and be digested but rewards by giving one plenty to chew on.

The Observer

A pleasure.  I learned a great deal and enjoyed it enormously.

Carolyn Larrington

Splendid. A heady mix of social, economic, and intellectual history, written in an engaging style. It offers a counterpoint to the many studies of the Mediterranean, arguing for the importance of the North Sea. Exciting, fun, and informative.

Michael Prestwich

03/01/2015
In his latest work, historian Pye (Taking Lives) excels at painting a unique portrait of the political, economic, and cultural transformation that has occurred on the shores of the North Sea, specifically in the UK, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Pye steps away from visualizing history in boxes by focusing on the positive advancements of previously criticized time periods such as the Dark Ages. His emphasis on the resilience of ethnic groups, such as the Frisians and the Vikings, to make decisions that changed the course of history instills the reader with hope about achieving success after setbacks. In addition, the author's inclusion of women's history shines light on previously overlooked events. VERDICT Pye's message and intention provides the reader with a refreshing view of the connection between time and place. His frequent use of primary sources as well as fictional literary works gives the work an ethereal nature. Readers who enjoy broad historical analysis will enjoy this book as a companion to Lincoln Paine's The Sea and Civilization and David Bates and Robert Liddiard's East Anglia and its North Sea World in the Middle Ages.—Marian Mays, Butte-Silver Bow P.L., MT

Library Journal

★ 2015-01-04
Novelist, journalist and historian Pye (The Pieces from Berlin, 2004, etc.) challenges all our notions of the Dark Ages and shows the vast accomplishments completed long before the Renaissance.The author chronicles the enormous impact of the countries bordering the North Sea, showing how the light shining out of those dark years changed our attitudes about art, mathematics, engineering, science, society and even women's rights. This book must be ranked right up there with the works of Mark Kurlansky and Thomas Cahill as a primer of the steps that led to modern civilization. Pye begins with the Frisians, who inhabited the areas along the border of the Netherlands and Belgium. They drained the salt marshes with dikes, ditches and windmills and created pastures for grazing. Their wide trading prompted the reintroduction of money and, most importantly, shared ideas. Learning was widespread during the Dark Ages, and countless universities were formed. The Venerable Bede wrote on nature and the tides and eventually became known as the "father of English history." Throughout this time period, books were borrowed and copied, and the independent thoughts contained within often made them worth burning. As Pye demonstrates, the Vikings had the widest impact on the area. As the first to be able to tack into the wind, they could travel and trade to Iceland, through the Baltic and down the Volga River, bringing back food, slaves and goods. The laws of the North Sea communities were actually quite liberal. Women were allowed to inherit, which led to later, and consensual, marriages, as well as the institutions of pensions and annuities. Also common were béguinages, religious houses for women who moved to the cities where they could safely work, earn and learn. A brilliant history of the Dark Ages showing the growth and development of science, business, fashion, law, politics and other significant institutions—a joy to read and reread.

Kirkus Reviews

A lively account. Pye’s vivid prose proves that this time was anything but dark.

Explorer's Journal

A masterly storyteller.

Vogue (London)

As Michael Pye shows us in The Edge of the World, the people living around the North Sea were crucial to the birth of a new Europe. Pye, like a scholarly magpie, picks up his glittering bits from the most up-to-date academic research.

Michael Dirda - The Washington Post

A treasure chest. [Pye] breaks most of the rules of scholarly history, but who cares? The end result is brilliantly illuminating. Pye’s creativity brings light to this once dark time.

The Times (London)

Bristling, wide-ranging and big-themed. At its most meaningful, history involves a good deal of art and storytelling. Pye’s book is full of both. An exuberant amalgam of sources. A fruitful way of reorienting our thinking about the past. By bringing back to life a mostly forgotten cast of medieval shippers, mauraders, thinkers and tinkerers, Pye challenges us to consider how we got to be where — and who — we are.

The New York Times Book Review