The Edge of the World By Michael PyePegasus, 2015The Edge of the World begins with an 18th century nobleman feeling fat on the beach. Like us, he sees the beach as a place of rest, amusement, and the occasional body-image freakout. For the rest of Michael Pye’s subjects, however, the North Sea is the gateway to wealth, adventure, and knowledge. It is a place of temptation and of heroism; a thoroughfare for traders bringing riches or a swarm of Vikings bearing torches.Pye’s history is about that sea and the people who flourished around it contrary to legends of a so-called “dark age.” Pye argues that we can appreciate the contributions and continuities of the North in their own right - as opposed to the more traditional narrative that makes them repeatedly beneficiaries of Southern culture and Renaissance - without conjuring racist fables of hard, blond conquerors and dark, lazy Southerners. He pursues that theme across twelve chapters, each of which is a kind of independent essay but also a collection of amusing or informative incidents. The book offers a hybrid kind of history. In part, Pye is arguing a thesis about cultural transformation and the creative potential of Northern Europe. At the same time, he has collected a number of amusing and revealing incidents. This episodic structure is as much burden as boon; some sections are simply delightful, but sometimes the argument is trampled under foot by rapid changes of topic.Apart from documenting the cultural transformation of Europe, Pye is eager to poke holes in the nationalist myth-making that clouded Europe’s self-understanding for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Such a sober attitude is especially welcome as nationalist sentiments are once again stirring across Europe, offering dubious narratives of ethnic solidarity, and casting suspicious glances at newer arrivals. Pye is more interested in the connections - violent and cooperative - that have kept Europe dynamic and interdependent since the end of the Roman era than in glorifying ‘pure’ and ancient nations. He’s not ignoring differences or down-playing cultural friction, but he takes pains to show all the extras, all the little bits nationalist history hides to make grand fables from ordinary follies. In a characteristic passage, Pye turns a jaundiced eye toward Irish heroics against Viking interlopers:

The Irish provincial kings were made to notice that the invaders were not simply landing, pillaging, ravaging and plundering; they were turning into neighbours, which was just as alarming. The Irish briefly stopped warring among themselves and defined the vikings as the enemy...The victories were obviously splendid because victories always are but they were also useful in the long term...a propaganda that would live for centuries.

His prose is just amused enough to make his point without stepping over into ridicule of the subjects. That wry tone is perfect for the genuinely bizarre turns history sometimes takes. Dublin, he points out for instance, was founded and settled by Norsemen. That most Irish of cities is itself an immigrant city. Pye doesn’t elaborate, but a fact like that does not need to be explained; it works better as a kind of argumentative zinger.Considered as an argument, the work suffers from a lack of clarity. There are sections of the book that attack nationalist mythology and there are sections that demonstrate Northern Europe’s pre-Renaissance cultural vitality. But these form a thematic core and not a narrative one. Talk generally circles back to one or the other of these theses (or at least entertains enough that you don’t mind), but most chapters show only the most vestigial discipline. The book is organized in a rather odd way. Beyond the two theses, each chapter has its own motif, but is then divided by blank lines into sections. The sections can be almost entirely self-contained and may comprise several stories or subsections. Occasionally, Pye just stumbles slant-wise from one topic to another as though each story reminds him of some other he can’t stop from telling. A single chapter addresses the following: raids on Ireland, an explorer named Ohthere, Arab-Viking dealings in Rus, ibn-Fadlan’s reconstruction of a Viking burial ritual, a modern reconstruction of the same, conversion by the sword, meditations on the slave-for-silver trade, literary and cultural fusions of Saxon and Christian mores, and, finally, back to raids on Ireland to segue to the next chapter. Naturally, none of these have very much room to breathe. Pye makes a point, indicates an odd landmark, gives the spiel, and we’re off again.Even if you are on-board with the power tourist version of history, how much this ramshackle approach amuses and how much it irritates depends largely on the quality of individual anecdotes. Pye has a good eye for a striking figure or a strange custom. He knows when to slip off stage and let the past erupt into the present with a spray of salt-air and hyperborean might. Ohthere, the aforementioned Viking wanderluster:

watched a wilderness gliding past him, rocky and frigid; but he kept sailing. ‘Then he was as far north as the furthest the whale hunters go,’ the limits of the of the usual world for men like him; he had been there before, once killed sixty whales (or it may have been walrus) in two days, or so he said. ‘Then he travelled further north, as far as he could sail in the next three days...’ He was beyond the help of maps, which showed only a maze of islands in the north and behind them a world of legends[.]

Or, if you are not subject to sailing’s peculiar nostalgia, how about gleefully out of date accusations of French foppery:

Robert I, King of Naples, blamed the French for the bumfreezer styles of the 1330s… Florence banned deep V-shaped necklines on a woman’s dress just on the suspicion of being French. And the English...reckoned fancy clothing came from France, as [one] said, ‘like the pox.’

Not that the French were laissez-faire about clothing; the king restricted his nobles to a mere four squirrel-fur robes to maintain the dignity of his rank as well as his closet. Even if these details don’t come together to prove much (and they don’t), it is still a lot of fun.The digressive style has its limitations though and Pye never entirely masters it. If a topic is especially shaggy or you simply read too much too fast, a kind of sleepwalker’s daze settles over you. More than a few times I stopped short, midway through a paragraph, unsure why I was suddenly reading about cod or decimal notation or what have you. If the tone of two sections or stories in a section are poorly matched, then the whiplash is especially unpleasant. Without an argumentative throughline, it is hard to organize the experience of a chapter into a coherent whole. One scrapes at the edge of memory for the steps that led from the Duke of Burgundy to the concept ‘fact’ and its legal parentage through, by some means, the origin of stock trading. Has a genuine point fled your grasp or are you chasing a spectral tangent? It is hard to tell and it muddles the experience of each particular point. Instead of enjoying the Duke’s unbelievable political antics, I’m trying to map a chapter’s argument, which may or may not exist.That’s not to say that Pye is just putting on circus. Some of the best anecdotes do just the opposite, displaying the humanity and dignity of people who make choices very different from our own. The beguines, women who lived as religious devotees outside the nun and convent system, are the most striking and subversive example. They were subversive in their time because:

they talked about God as though they loved Him, body and soul, with all the madness and passion of love, and as though they could go to Him directly, without church or priest in the way; this was such an alarming heresy that Marguerite Porete died for it in 1310. And, to make matters even worse, they used everyday language and not Latin; everybody knew what they were saying.

They also subvert the worst stereotypes of medieval religiosity: theirs is a prudent, level-headed faith without the mysticism or monasticism one might expect. They taught, they worked, they worshipped, and for the most part they organized their affairs in a supportive, pragmatic manner. Their colonies allowed them to maintain a busy, but dignified life and to contribute skills to the community, even when it reacted with paranoia or mockery. The miracles and suffering and grand gestures, which are imputed to them, were all conjured up by outsiders eager to ‘explain’ why anyone would abandon the strictures of conventional faith and gender roles. Surely, any woman who - gasp - taught men to read and write must be damaged or pained in some way. Pye manages to display the beguines as they understood themselves and the hysterical reaction to them all in just a few pages. This is where The Edge of the World works, as a book of starting places, hints, and portents.The Edge of the World has a more serious problem when it makes sweeping gestures. Pye starts his adventure with the Frisians, a mercantile people given to a strange kind of life built around flat-bottom boats and the soggy marshes of the northern Netherlands and northwest Germany. When the sea came to claim their salt marshes, the Frisians built themselves hills to live on called terpen. When pressure from the Holy Roman Empire scattered them, they built trade networks joined by the sea. By carrying their customs with them and staying near the North Sea, they could maintain a large and lively network of traders. Most importantly, they kept money flowing through Europe rather than letting it sink entirely down into a barter economy. Pye asserts that the use of money as a medium of abstract value ensured “a new way of thinking became possible.” Seven chapters later he finally defends that claim. What was this “new way of thinking?” Why, it was the use of ratios and mathematical metaphors. “The Frisians went trading and they brought money with them, which is a way to bring very different objects into one equation and do the sums. Now that same kind of equation took in music, blasphemy, pardon from Hell, love and charity: it took in the world.”The Edge of the World makes interesting claims about Europe’s development, but they are only harmed when accompanied by wild claims. First, the Frisians wouldn’t have made this new way of thinking possible, the original use of money made it possible. Second, the underlying claim is incredibly contentious regardless of who used what and when. Third, they were not the only people making use of coinage, so they were not essential as the phrasing implies. Fourth, people had already made the conceptual leap Pye is implying lies ahead. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, for instance, represents justice as a ratio and famously defines virtue as a proper proportion, thus using the kind of mathematical metaphors that interest Pye a full millennium before the Paris academics. Fifth, drawing a line across hundreds of years (and miles) because Frisians and those academics both use money is a paper thin connection. I am not sure if such claims were really intended to be taken this seriously. They seem more like hooks meant to keep you tuned-in through the commercial break than deliberate contentions.Pye makes more than a few of these showy claims. For instance, he loosely structures the fashion chapter around the politics of looking good. Social mobility is political and ethical dynamite, so he’s not wrong to point out sartorial laws are a kind of social control. Is this worked out in detail to show how these specific social forces work and how the relevant, reactionary attitudes arose? It would certainly be fascinating to watch the culture and politics of a town, lets say, change at the hands of lace and frill. No, the chapter takes a three-century sized bite which naturally dilutes its argumentative power. It tosses off some great lines and it is fun as can be to read, but a few examples can only support so much. And I’m not cherry picking a few weak or ill-conceived lines. Such under-defended generalizations recur regularly. Here’s Pye’s account of modernity in 100 words from the chapter on canon law:

Being professional proved a most powerful idea. It depended on the schools and the teachers that banded together in the newly founded universities, in Oxford and in Paris in the North, and the idea of a qualification: a degree. Judges would hear only the qualified. That invented a class of lawyers who were licensed to talk in courts as well as read the books, which invented the very idea of a professional class, which in turn became the basis of the idea of a middle class -- people with power based on their expertise, neither knights nor peasants but able from the middle to tell both what to do.

All of that follows from a page and a half of exposition, most of which concerns how expensive lawyers were. My point isn’t that Pye is wrong, but that such an audacious claim can’t be supported this way. A few stories are not enough to capture the impact of canon law, professionalization, and the rise of the middle class. Compression is understandable, even necessary, but so is modesty.I could multiply examples, but that would do a disservice to The Edge of the World. Pye relates much that is interesting and rightfully draws attention to the vigor and cultural ferment of Northern Europe. He’s certainly put in a great deal of research to marshal such a wide array of incidents, but that diversity isn’t an unalloyed good. All of the anecdotes - no matter how scattered - do support the general thrust that the North contributed to the formation of modern Europe, but the stronger, bolder claims suffer seriously from the lack of focus.____Matt Ray is a philosophy graduate student. He blogs at Hedonaut.