The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe

by Michael Pye

Robert Grosseteste launched the science of optics, which was known as perspectiva, and he drew out diagrams and used mathematics to try to show how we see things; but he saw light as the cause of everything, something from God that multiplies itself and produces matter that takes up space in the world. His geometry was a way to put the intangible on paper, to get a physical grip on mystery; physical fact and spiritual visions were both in his mind.27 Roger Bacon thought optics was a useful science precisely because it gave men access to the miraculous in nature. ‘There are,’ he writes, ‘an infinite number of truths in living things.’28

By English law in 1388, servants and labourers who had gone travelling were made to return to their home villages, ‘to work at whatever occupation they had formerly undertaken’; an old, familiar world was being restored.

Plague, like the threat of terror nowadays, was the reason for supervising people’s lives, examining, controlling and disciplining. The