![]() ![]() This bias, he says, has much to do with the kind of documentary information that was preserved, and with the people who preserved it. Pye notices that there’s a bias in all this toward the Mediterranean Sea, the Roman Catholic Church and the aristocratic regimes that ruled Western Europe. Humanism and three-point perspective came out of the Italian Renaissance. The Romans gave us paved roads and running water. What Pye - an English novelist, journalist and writer of popular history - is taking issue with is our packaging of the past. In the pages that follow, he doesn’t prove that grand statement so much as toss handfuls of paint at it, in many places coloring it in while obscuring it in others. “This cold, gray sea in an obscure time made the modern world possible,” he declares in his introduction. In “The Edge of the World,” Pye concentrates on a murky era - the Middle Ages - and on a region of Europe that seems always to have been blanketed in mist, the North Sea. ![]() At its most meaningful, history involves a good deal of art and storytelling. It’s the sort of historical work whose thesis is virtually impossible to prove, but it’s also a reminder that history isn’t an exact science. ![]() Michael Pye’s new book is bristling, wide-ranging and big-themed. ![]()
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