Review by Choice Review
This book is strictly for general readers, primarily because of the man of straw nature of the thesis and the presentation of the supporting evidence. Although historians still argue about the extent and significance of the survival of Romanitas in the late antique/early medieval world, few would question the cultural shift toward northwestern Europe. Moreover, the author's advocacy of the importance of the North Sea region, which he demonstrates, sometimes strays into hyperbole. For example, in spite of the chapter titled "The Invention of Money," the early medieval Frisians helped reintroduce coinage into the area, not invent it, which Pye later admits. In addition, can the emergence of a medieval scientific worldview be primarily attributed to the use of mathematics in the economic reckonings of the North Sea region? The author's very description of this area as being an "edge" necessitates demonstrating the interaction between this periphery and the rest of continental Europe, which the author does. This said, for beginners desirous of a well-written and eclectic glimpse of the medieval period, this is a good book. Those more advanced in their studies will find the thesis and generalizations a bit overdone. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers/public libraries only. --Robert T. Ingoglia, Caldwell University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
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. In "The Edge of the World," Pye concentrates on a murky era - the Middle Ages - and on a region of Europe that seems always to have been blanketed in mist, the North Sea. "This cold, gray sea in an obscure time made the modern world possible," he declares in his introduction. In the pages that follow, he doesn't prove that grand statement so much as toss handfuls of paint at it, in many places coloring it in while obscuring it in others. What Pye - an English novelist, journalist and writer of popular history - is taking issue with is our packaging of the past. Of necessity, we simplify. The Romans gave us paved roads and running water. Monasteries preserved knowledge. Humanism and three-point perspective came out of the Italian Renaissance. Pye notices that there's a bias in all this toward the Mediterranean Sea, the Roman Catholic Church and the aristocratic regimes that ruled Western Europe. This bias, he says, has much to do with the kind of documentary information that was preserved, and with the people who preserved it. "A letter about planting crops or buying shirts may disappear," he notes, whereas "a charter for land belonging to the church is very likely to survive." Official chroniclers of the past recorded what mattered to their bosses, but much of the substance of an era is to be found in what was left unrecorded. The impulse to get beyond the standard texts leads Pye to compile an exuberant amalgam of sources: Angle and Saxon, archaeological and scatological. Since much of this is below the level of recorded history, neglected or demonized by official narratives, he has to pull and tweak his material. Pye follows in the wake of a number of academic historians, many from the parts of Europe he writes about, but the synthesis and presentation are all his own. They are usefully, and often delightfully, jarring. He's interested in the Vikings, the Frisians, Iceland, "the 'farmers' republic' of Dithmarscha." He looks for lost clues to the birth of modernity not in Leonardo's drawings or the court of Louis XIV but in the fens and marshes of the North Sea. Coastal England is one of the places the North Sea washes, and Pye starts by providing a corrective to our common understanding of how England came to be. The traditional version comes from the Venerable Bede, the eighth-century monk whose "Church History of the English People" tells of the invasion of the island by Germanic tribes (the Angles, Saxons and Jutes), who displaced the people they found there and set the foundations of English language and culture. "But what if there never was an invasion?" Pye asks. He is looking at archaeological evidence that shows a much more gradual takeover, involving centuries of peaceable trade and commingling. Bede's compact and serviceable creation myth obscures a history in which those tribes, along with others in present-day Scandinavia, Belgium and the Netherlands, pushed European civilization onward, inventing or reinventing concepts, coining new terms and new ways of seeing. Much of the story Pye reports involves money and the making of it. The people he writes about lived marginal lives; they inhabited the marshy and unpredictable coastal lands that kings and noble families tended to stay clear of. But the tenuousness of their position gave them an advantage, since it meant they weren't locked into the rigid feudal system. They learned to do things on their own, as individuals. The Frisians, and then other groups along the Dutch and Flemish coasts, heaped soil up into artificial hills and used dams and dikes to reclaim land from the sea and rivers. They began buying and selling this new territory, developing a real-estate-based economy. The reclaimed land was good for pasturing, which led to the herding of cows and then to another Dutch innovation, cleanliness, because butter- and cheese-making demanded it. These coastal peoples did business with one another. If you are in Ipswich, on England's east coast, Pye notes, and "if you think in terms of the time it takes to get to places, then Bergen in Norway is closer than York in England." The North Sea became a community of traders. Their activity required a currency to give relative value to various goods, so the participants resurrected the Roman practice of using coin money. The Frisians minted silver coins and, Pye says, "the Anglo-Saxons in England imitated the Frisians." These northern peoples also, he suggests, may have had a hand in promoting doubleentry bookkeeping. Later, the first stock exchanges came into being in this part of Europe. Pye devotes a good chunk of his book to the boogeymen of medieval Europe, the Vikings. He follows them on their swaggering voyages, stating that they not only plundered Ireland but also settled in and reshaped Dublin, turning it from "an accident of a holy place" into "a base for trading." It's a bottom-up argument: that as the Catholic Church and Europe's monarchies became bloated and slow, these small-scale innovators found openings to exploit. They enriched themselves, and in time their innovations were adopted by others. The cities that participated in the Hanseatic League - which ranged around the North and Baltic Seas and made free-trading alliances with little regard for national boundaries - are prime evidence for this argument. PYE'S book starts to get a bit clogged as he pulls other types of change under the explanatory paradigm of his argument, sometimes with sweeping generalizations. Thus he says the traders of the North Sea adopted "the idea of thinking of weather as a phenomenon in itself, not the expression of some higher power," and asserts that thanks to such changes "magic was becoming self-conscious." But this isn't to complain that Pye goes too far with his argument on behalf of these northern peoples. On the contrary, he has made such a compelling case that I would have welcomed more development of these far-flung connections. To take one provocative example, he observes that in the 1330s, while the pope was selling indulgences, French theologians were "measuring ratios for grace and love and charity." The clever aspect of this lies in his conclusion. He's not out to condemn the cheapening of faith but to delineate the spread of traders' math: "When both virtue and sin can be turned into numbers, and calculated and assessed, mathematics has entered the minds of theologians and philosophers and not just engineers and merchants." This is a lively notion, but to prove it, or at least make the connection persuasive, would require exploring it for more than two paragraphs. Then again, maybe to complain about such things is to complain that Pye has written only one book instead of a series of them. 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. Pye's sources are an exuberant amalgam: Angle and Saxon, archaeological and scatological RUSSELL SHORTO'S latest book is "Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 7, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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 (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 bguinages, 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 institutionsa joy to read and reread. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
