Dark Ages Totally Explained

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ť This article is about the term "dark age(s)" as a characterization of the (Early) Middle Ages in Western Europe.:For the period itself, see Middle Ages and Early Middle Ages.

   For other uses of the phrase see Dark Ages (disambiguation). In European historiography, the term Dark Age(s) refers to the Early Middle Ages, the period encompassing (roughly) 476 to 1000 AD.
   This concept of a Dark Age was created by the Italian scholar Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) in the 1330s and was originally intended as a sweeping criticism of the character of Late Latin literature. Later historians expanded the term to refer to the transitional period between Classical Roman Antiquity and the High Middle Ages, including not only the lack of Latin literature, but also a lack of contemporary written history, general demographic decline, limited building activity and material cultural achievements in general. Popular culture has further expanded on the term as a vehicle to depict the Middle Ages as a time of backwardness, extending its pejorative use and expanding its scope.
   The rise of archaeology and other specialties in the 20th century has shed much light on the period and offered a more nuanced understanding of its positive developments. Other terms of periodization have come to the fore: Late Antiquity, the Early Middle Ages, and the Great Migrations, depending on which aspects of culture are being emphasized.
   When modern scholarly study of the Middle Ages arose in the 19th century, the term "Dark Ages" was at first kept, with all its critical overtones. When the term "Dark Ages" is used by historians today, it's intended to be neutral, namely, to express the idea that the events of the period often seem "dark" to us only because of the paucity of historical records, artistic and cultural output compared with later times.

Petrarch

It is generally accepted that the concept was created by Petrarch in the 1330s. Writing of those who had come before him, he said, "Amidst the errors there shone forth men of genius, no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom." Christian writers had traditional metaphors of "light versus darkness" to describe "good versus evil". Petrarch was the first to co-opt the metaphor and give it secular meaning by reversing its application. Classical Antiquity, so long considered the "dark" age for its lack of Christianity, was now seen by Petrarch as the age of "light" because of its cultural achievements, while Petrarch's time, lacking such cultural achievements, was seen as the age of darkness.
As an Italian, Petrarch saw the Roman Empire and the classical period as expressions of Italian greatness.
The public idea of the Middle Ages as a supposed "Dark Age" is also reflected in misconceptions regarding the study of nature during this period. The contemporary historians of science David C. Lindberg and Ronald Numbers discuss the widespread popular belief that the Middle Ages was a "time of ignorance and superstition", the blame for which is to be laid on the Christian Church for allegedly "placing the word of religious authorities over personal experience and rational activity", and emphasize that this view is essentially a caricature. For instance, a claim that was first propagated in the 19th century and is still very common in popular culture is the supposition that the people from the Middle Ages believed that the Earth was flat. According to Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, this claim was mistaken, as "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who didn't acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference."

Quotations

"What else, then, is all history, but the praise of Rome?"—Petrarch
"Each famous author of antiquity whom I recover places a new offence and another cause of dishonour to the charge of earlier generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds, and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through insufferable neglect. Although they'd nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed posterity of its ancestral heritage."—Petrarch
"My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms. But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you'll live long after me, there will follow a better age. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance."—Petrarch
"Between the far away past history of the world, and that which lies near to us; in the time when the wisdom of the ancient times was dead and had passed away, and our own days of light hadn't yet come, there lay a great black gulf in human history, a gulf of ignorance, of superstition, of cruelty, and of wickedness. That time we call the dark or Middle Ages. Few records remain to us of that dreadful period in our world's history, and we only know of it through broken and disjointed fragments that have been handed down to us through the generations."— Howard Pyle, Otto of the Silver Hand (1888)
"The Middle Ages is an unfortunate term. It wasn't invented until the age was long past. The dwellers in the Middle Ages wouldn't have recognized it. They didn't know that they were living in the middle; they thought, quite rightly, that they were time's latest achievement."—Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages (1968)
"If it was dark, it was the darkness of the womb." — Lynn White

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