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., Excellent. It's complicated, but fun., Beautifully written and thoughtfully researched. He writes about difficult concepts with vivid details and stories, often jump-cutting from exposition to drama like a film. Pye advances on several fronts at once, following the overlapping currents of customary, religious and empirical ways of thinking.

Pye draws on a dizzying array of documentary and archaeological scholarship, which he works together in surprising ways.

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., Mr. 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., Novelist, journalist and historian Pye challenges all our notions of the Dark Ages and shows the vast accomplishments completed long before the Renaissance. 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., Beautifully written and thoughtfully researched. His frequent use of primary sources as well as fictional literary works gives the work an ethereal nature. Pye's message and intention provides the reader with a refreshing view of the connection between time and place. Grey the waters of the North Sea may be but Pye has successfully dyed them with a multitude of rich colors., 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., 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. 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.

The Edge of the World by Michael Pye