To take a moment to stand back and start to notice that maybe not all we hear about as we’ve grown up is connected and possibly untrue. The book The Edge of the World, written by Michael Pye allows us to have a different view of our past and things in it that we may never have known.With a 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 and a millennium later. But it has become increasingly popular 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. 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. 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. And that is important to Pye’s thesis for he claims that it was those people who lived beyond the imperial reach who created the circumstances and the tools for what we consider modernistic.
It starts with the Frisians, with a change of climate and the fall of Rome. Pliny the Younger had mentioned that there were people on the edge of the world
who lived cut off from the mainland by marshes. They were sea people, he announced, and all they had in their lives was fish, so they were not …show more content…
It tells some of the history of the North Sea and its peoples. It traces the development of several things that came out of that sea, among them the idea that one could shape the world to one’s needs, that women could make key choices in their lives, that law was power and, by extension, that lawmakers and doctors were powerful. And it challenges the idea that we owe our world to the ancients and the Renaissance. “We are not on the margins of history anymore,” Pye concludes
It starts with the Frisians, with a change of climate and the fall of Rome. Pliny the Younger had mentioned that there were people on the edge of the world
who lived cut off from the mainland by marshes. They were sea people, he announced, and all they had in their lives was fish, so they were not …show more content…
It tells some of the history of the North Sea and its peoples. It traces the development of several things that came out of that sea, among them the idea that one could shape the world to one’s needs, that women could make key choices in their lives, that law was power and, by extension, that lawmakers and doctors were powerful. And it challenges the idea that we owe our world to the ancients and the Renaissance. “We are not on the margins of history anymore,” Pye concludes