Reviewing Patrick Wyman’s “The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years That Shook The World”

I’ve been a big fan of Patrick Wyman’s Tides of History podcast for years, so when I found out he was writing a book, effectively a capstone on his series on Early Modern Europe, I pre-ordered it immediately. I took my time in reading it, and found it to be not only an excellent extension of his work on his podcast, capturing the feel of the time through portraits of real people, but also an excellent introduction to this particular time period, 1490–1530, where so much happened that continues to shape our world. As a graduate of a Lutheran Seminary, I was deeply interested in the way it would cover and contextualize the Reformation. Read on to hear more about this book, but if you’re just looking for a recommendation, you’ve got it! This is a great book for people of all interest levels in history.

The Verge makes a relatively straightforward case: a series of connected events between the years of 1490 and 1530 radically altered Europe and placed it on a crash course with the rest of the world. Europe’s rapid leap in technological and scientific advancement is often called “The Great Divergence” and Wyman argues that that divergence has it’s origins here, over the span of about half a lifetime, when new technology and, more importantly, new systems of thought changed…