The title, however, should more exactly refer to “the edge of the Roman world” for this is where the North Sea sits, in many places well beyond the imperial frontier. But no book I have read, nor any that I spotted in Pye’s 50 pages of references, has looked at the available evidence in the way it is presented here. But it has become increasingly fashionable to wonder whether there wasn’t something going on in all that time, and Michael Pye is certainly not the first to shine a light into the gloom. Michael Pye thinks we owe a greater debt elsewhere and has written a book to support this idea.Ī conventional view of history has the dark ages beginning with the decline of Rome in the 400s and the lights not coming back on until the Renaissance a millennium later. His colleagues of the Enlightenment were happy to concur and ever since then we have tended to draw a line through history that makes us the heirs of ancient Rome and beyond it, Greece. He then enthused about painting, sculpture, ruins and, ultimately, the entire classical achievement. The German polymath Goethe would have approved of that because on his first journey to Italy, in autumn 1786, he had barely crossed the Alps before he started enthusing about the food. 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.I n a recent survey of our favourite dishes, pizza, lasagne and spaghetti all made it into the top 10. 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. This is the magnificent lost history of a thousand years. 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. 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. An epic adventure ranging from the terror of the Vikings to the golden age of cities: Michael Pye tells the amazing story of how modernity emerged on the shores of the North Sea.

The Edge of the World by Michael Pye