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Michael Pye
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The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe Paperback – September 6, 2016

by Michael Pye (Author)
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 1,087 ratings
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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.
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  1. Print length
    408 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Pegasus Books
  4. Publication date
    September 6, 2016
  5. Dimensions
    5.5 x 1.13 x 8.25 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    168177206X
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1681772066
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“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

“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 lively account. Pye’s vivid prose proves that this time was anything but dark.”
- Explorer's Journal

“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

“Novelist, journalist and historian Pye challenges all our notions of the Dark Ages and shows the vast accomplishments completed long before the Renaissance. 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 (starred review)

“Historian Pye excels at painting a unique portrait of the political, economic, and cultural transformation that has occurred on the shores of the North Sea. 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.”
- Library Journal

“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, bestselling author of Black Sea

“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

“An utterly beguiling journey into the dark ages of the north sea. A complete revelation. Pye writes like a dream. Magnificent.”
- Jerry Brotton, author of A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN TWELVE MAPS

“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, Professor of History, Durham University

“Takes readers on a far-ranging tour of Europe during the Dark Ages. Pye’s 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. An eye-opening reexamination of the era, and delightfully accessible.”
- Publishers Weekly

“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, New York Times bestselling author of THE NO. 1 LADIES' DETECTIVE AGENCY

“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, author of THE INHERITANCE OF ROME: A HISTORY OF EUROPE FROM 400 TO 1000

“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, author of PERIODIC TALES and ANATOMIES

“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)

“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)

“A pleasure. I learned a great deal and enjoyed it enormously.”
- Carolyn Larrington, St. John's College, Oxford

“Brilliant. Pye is a wonderful historian . . . bringing history to life like no one else.”
- Terry Jones

“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

“The amazing story of how the North Sea made us who we are. A dazzling historical adventure.”
- The Daily Telegraph

“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

“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

“Extraordinary. Astonishing. The end result is brilliantly illuminating. Pye’s creativity brings light to this once dark time.”
- The Times Saturday Review

“A masterly storyteller.”
- Vogue (London)

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.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pegasus Books; Reprint edition (September 6, 2016)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 408 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 168177206X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1681772066
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.13 x 8.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 1,087 ratings

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Michael Pye

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Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
1,087 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Sotto voce
5.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining peek at the civilization of Northmen
Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2017
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So history readers … we have to admit that Western history is Mediterranean centric. Greco-Roman history frames nearly all of our understanding. But it's the subtle and rebellious nuance of the North Sea peoples that's not much considered within the whole of Western civilization. The North Sea civilizations populated a larger geographic area than the Mediterranean. The Northmen would write the last chapter of Rome and the Roman Med. Early Greeks and the Roman Army simply did not 'discover' the North Sea peoples ... they encountered them and unlike so many discovered peoples, the Northmen lived on independent. They often won but just as often were defeated. By the fortune of Latin and Greek being widely written, so history was written. The Med-centric world-view did not defeat or possess the Northman.

Michael Pye is has an interesting story to tell here. As limited as the documented North Sea history is, Pye pries loose what can be known. The Med-centrics of course funded the writings that survived and we rely upon. The horrid climate of North Sea nations and Baltic simply did not cooperate with preserving organic media. Julius Caesar was the beneficiary of timing by invading the splintered and already defeated Celts/Gauls/Germanics. The tribes were torn apart as a people after coming up on the losing side of some vast, pre-historic, multi-generational era of Northern European total war. The integrity of the Venerable Bede (in the pay of Rome), et. al. are challenged by modern archaeological understanding. The genetic record reports a different story. History as we know it becomes different with the modern efforts of Pye and others.

So, the evidence presents peculiar conflicts with written history. The Venerable Bede suggests his Saxons and Celts exterminated the Britons. But an enclave remained to evidence 600,000 Brits directly descended from a 9000-year old Britonic tooth that can beg to differ. Celts, likely from Brittany, are evidenced to have invaded England and the Northern Iberia in the region of the Basques during the Celtic flight west and north from mainland Europe and gaining an English foothold centuries before the Romans and a millennia before the Vikings. The Northmen descended from a highly sophisticated multi-millennial civilization of trade linked by a 4-5 day sea journey and wind.

The "Edge of the World" is a study in common market economics. Family, small unit, village, town and port city survival was superordinate in these stormy, sub-zero, seashore footholds. The real story of the cod & slave civilization seems likely consistent to Pye's portrayal within a fraction of a standard deviation.

An unknown North Sea 'Lingua Franca' existed; a sort of North Sea pidgin. A common tongue that likely quickly evolved. English is a good candidate to have survived whatever was common tongue. Whatever it was, it changed quickly and served the instant need for commerce. It is remarkable that institutions existed to salvage the relatively small number of non-religious references that exist. Evidences suggest that the most distant trading outposts in the most Northern Scandinavian indeed lost the ability to remain in the civilization as they lost the Lingua Franca. Pye shows how the pidgin generationally evolved very unlike Latin. Iceland is said by the first Vikings to have been home to Irishmen with an ancient pidgin dialect unintelligible at the time … the Irishmen packed up and left. The modern evidence for the pidgin is surely the super-hybrid language of English we inherited.

Pye is to be commended for departing from the mostly highborn narrative to consider the everyman part-time fishmonger and sailor and the part-time seasonal warrior. Pye provides some excellent snapshots. Frisians and Britons and Saxons and Vikings transacted in an accepted common currency of modern conceptual 'money' as the storage and transactional exchange of wealth. The 'seashore' is a thoroughly modern image of the place to convene with natures beauty. From 1750, the seashore domains reeked of fish, humans and animals so terribly that it was feared that letters sent from the seashore would stink-up the farmstead or castle when read ... not that anything before 1900 had much of anything that smelled societally good where boats and people transacted. We have an opportunity to share an isolated family unit/tribe and city whose life was chasing a moving sand spit in the modern Netherlands.

Pye reveals numerous fascinating archeological sub-lines to confound written history. It was never 'dark' as in ages but always present and directed at surviving the next night. Is it really a surprise to find a prehistoric Irish horse bridle repurposed to a prehistoric Viking broach? It was the great North Sea civilization of the cod & slave. Pye speculates a 'pre-historic' foundation for the amalgam of North Sea centric civilizations. The Hanseatic League first reflected sophistications indicative of thousands of years a highly sophisticated ancient acceptable, trusted into a long developed ‘uniform commercial code’ of North Sea value.

5-star entertainment. Grasping the evolution of North Sea civilization is extremely difficult and dynamic with archaeological surprises still abundant.
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Clay Garner
4.0 out of 5 stars ‘Forgetting history or even getting it wrong is one element in building a nation,’ Ernest Renan
Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2019
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“‘Forgetting history or even getting it wrong is one of the major elements in building a nation,’ Ernest Renan wrote, and he said history was a danger to nationalism; Eric Hobsbawm added: ‘I regard it as the primary duty of modern historians to be such a danger.’”

Pye applies this maxim, in fact, he must. Why? His focus is on European history from 700 to 1700 CE. No national state exists in the modern sense anyway for most of that era.

“For national history has a way of being radically incomplete. The Irish were and are deeply attached to the notion of an island of saints and scholars, which is not wrong at all, except that it leaves out the raiders, slavers and traders. Some Dutchmen used to have a deep mistrust of anything medieval on the grounds that it was bound to be Catholic and therefore unpatriotic and wrong, but it’s tough to get right a history that has to be a perfect blank before the Protestant sixteenth century; and it can be silly.’’

Therefore much of this work will present people, ideas, events and connections that other histories overlook. Makes for interesting reading.

What does he highlight?

From introduction . . .

“This book is about rediscovering that lost world, and what it means to us: the life 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. This is not the usual story of muddled battles and various kings and the spread of Christianity. It is the story of how the constant exchanges over water, the half-knowledge that things could be done differently, began to change people’s minds profoundly.’’

Where? The North Sea . . .

“This cold, grey sea in an obscure time made the modern world possible.’’

Who?

“That created a community of people who did business, strong enough and self-conscious enough to go to war with royal and political powers: our world of tension between money and every other power. Humans changed the landscape and, in the course of learning to manage the damage to the natural world, they also spread the idea of being free and having rights. Travel around the sea made fashion possible, and visible, and desirable; we have not yet escaped.’’

Explains the importance of the Dutch voluntary cooperation to recover land from the sea and how this led to new type of political union.

Fascinating!

What else?

“Women’s choices, including celibacy or pregnancy on their own terms or else marriage, changed the economic life of the North Sea in quite unexpected ways. Law changed from the local customs everybody knew to a language and a set of texts that needed lawyers: professions were born, first priests, who had to stay out of the secular world, then lawyers, who made law into a kind of religion, then doctors and all the rest. Without that, we would have no idea of a middle class: people whose power came from being experts.’’

As these slices indicate, Pye presents considerable history of different groups and influential thinkers. For example, index shows - Abélard, Alcuin, Albertus Magnus, Alfred the great, Ambrose, Augustine, Aristotle, etc., etc., and that is just under ‘A’! Makes for colorful, educational panorama.

Introduction
1 The invention of money
2. The book trade
3. Making enemies
4. Settling
5. Fashion
6. Writing the law
7. Overseeing nature
8. Science and money
9. Dealers rule
10. Love and capital
11. The plague laws
12. The city and the world

One theme reappears regularly . . .

“Above all, the world is ready to be counted and engineered, to put mathematics at the heart of building a fort or a windmill, keeping the records of a business or laying out a town. Antwerp knew that change, but rebellion and a war of religious denominations took out the city’s sense of order. Amsterdam inherited the idea. Both cities shared the same shining, seemingly reasonable faith which we still maintain. That faith has roots very deep in time.’’

Mathematics became (still) a key to modernity. He explains how and why surfaced. Well done.

Last page . . .

“Alongside this need to control went a new appetite for experiment: for finding things out and then testing and proving them. The process that Simon Stevin would develop had already begun out of terror of Mongol hordes and the end of the world. In the new universities mathematical thinking was tangled up still with the idea of money, of moral trading and just prices: the connection that began with the Frisians was still shaping minds. Trading became a power in its own right. The towns of the German Hansa formed an alliance which could make its own treaties, see off kings, blockade a nation into starvation and force surrender. Money went to war with political powers. The modern world is taking its shape: law, professions, the written word; towns, and what they do to the natural world; books and fashion, business and its relationship to power. We are not on the margins of history any more; we are dealing in the essential, the changes of mind that made our world possible.’’

What happened?

“In Antwerp all this produced a glittering civilization which spawned so many of our attitudes: to art, insurance, shares, genius, power as a great show; to the possibility of engineering the world as we want it. When war broke up Flanders, when the northern provinces broke away, those attitudes came to Amsterdam. They came in glory. They look like something both new and brilliant, but the truth is that they grew out of the light in what we used to casually call the ‘dark ages’ and the central importance of what we used to call ‘the edge of the world’. Around the cold, grey waters of the North Sea, the old, the marginal, the unfashionable made us possible: for much better, and for much, much worse. It is time now to give them all their due.’’

Easy reading. Draws clear, even vivid portraits of many. Also, paints understandable panoramas of groups; i.e. medieval monks, Frisian traders, Viking raiders, catholic theologians, Dutch rebels, etc., etc..

Closer to a good novel than school textbook. Nevertheless, tremendous scholarship!

Provides insights that adds understanding of where present came from.

However, his writing could use a good editing. Too much repetition, too many words, too many ideas, too much opinion, too many sentences.

I did skip a lot.

Two maps

Hundreds and hundreds of references (linked). Outstanding!

Detailed index (not linked)

No photographs

No charts
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Robert Ray
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting tidbits but not a coherent history
Reviewed in the United States on June 15, 2015
Verified Purchase
The author has found items across an amazingly wide range of sources but it's a little like reading history from a supermarket tabloid. His thesis is overstated, it doesn't hang together and he frequently drops a subject in the middle. His discussion of the Hansa seems to focus on the most outrageous items and ends without discussing why the Hansa league collapsed (it couldn't withstand the rise of powerful nation states; the idea that money could withstand political and military power is ludicrous - it didn't). His thesis that modern control of people's lives dates from reactions to the Black Plague doesn't seem reasonable either. He almost totally ignores any contributions from southern Europe (although he notes that that the Hansa failed to keep up with financial innovations from Italy). Several pages on a Catholic propagandist in Antwerp didn't seem to have anything to do with his arguments. For a book much about the rise of modern capitalism he seems to be very unhappy about capitalism. On the other hand his brief discussion of the Frisians was quite new and interesting (although they hardly invented money). Having visited the very lovely Beguinage in Bruges I was happy to learn about the beguines (that chapter starts with a story that could have been a 14th century tabloid article) . It's mostly an interesting and fun read but it won't make much of a contribution to understanding the broad themes of European history.
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J. Lock
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 20, 2024
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Hugely informative and not overly long or detailed. Highly recommended.
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erik johansson
5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond the south...
Reviewed in Spain on December 21, 2020
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Interesting vindication of the north Europe history, a good starter to understand the way things are nowadays. This should be an obligated book at r we very history course. I honestly will re-read it as much as I can.
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Peter Berlin
5.0 out of 5 stars Well written and very infomative
Reviewed in Germany on July 23, 2018
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I enjoying reading this booklet. Human development and civilization always depended in water. The earliest cultures were determined by rivers, the River Nile and Euphrat and Tigers in Mesopotamia, then all European cultures arose around the Mediterranean, the Greeks and the Romans, till it shifted further north to the North Sea, later on to the Atlantic Ocean with the discovery of the Americas. Today 40% of all products are made around the Pacific Ocean.

Goods and ideas travel much faster and easier across the water. Here is where the North Sea comes in. The invention of money, the impact of the Frisians and Vikings and many more influences that helped shape the Europe of today.

The book made me curious to find out even more about the Dark Ages and how crossing the North Sea changed Europe forever.

It is well written and informative so I think it is worth five stars.
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Ken Walton
5.0 out of 5 stars The book has such a broad view of economics and ...
Reviewed in Canada on August 16, 2015
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The book has such a broad view of economics and history and yet it I connect with it personally.
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The bookloving Norman
5.0 out of 5 stars Le radici del presente nel Mare del Nord
Reviewed in Italy on August 11, 2015
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L'assunto di questo saggio si riassume in tre punti: 1) a differenza di come viene solitamente raccontato a scuola, l'arco di tempo tra la caduta dell'impero romano d'Occidente e il Medioevo dei Comuni e delle Crociate non è un lungo periodo vuoto in cui non c'è cultura, nè fermento ma solo distruzione portata da barbari che verranno poi civilizzati dal cristianesimo. 2) il nostro mondo attuale non nasce quando nel Rinascimento "rinascono" le arti e la filosofia, la rinascita culturale si innesta sugli effetti di quello che i popoli "barbari" hanno fatto nell'alto medioevo viaggiando, scoprendo, commerciando e scontrandosi tra loro e con il mondo cristiano 3) Se nello studiare la storia si considerano solo le testimonianze scritte lasciate ordinatamente nei conventi e nelle cancellerie, e si studiano solo i monumenti di marmo e le sepolture comodamente collocate sotto le volte delle chiese, si rischia di perdere parecchi elementi e dare una visione molto parziale e distorta dei fatti, come oggi cominciamo ad ammettere grazie a un approccio che combina la linguistica e una archeologia senza paraocchi per la quale, ad esempio, uno scheletro sepolto con armi, almeno in determinati contesti culturali, non deve per forza essere di un uomo.

Sebbene non sempre sia chiarissimo, forse perchè l'autore non è uno storico accademico, è un libro estremamente interessante e ben documentato, sia per chi è interessato alle civiltà del Nord Europa (in particolare la questione della cristianizzazione dei popoli germanici è raccontata rifiutando la canonica identità tra paganesimo e barbarie, e tra cristianesimo e civiltà, che nelle nostre scuole è ancora standard) che, più in genera le, per chi cerca un'ottica diversa e non scontata nel guardare al rapporto tra presente e passato.
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