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Dark Ages (historiography)

This article is about the concept of a Dark Age in Western Europe after the Fall of the Western Roman Empire. For other uses, see Dark Ages (disambiguation).
Petrarch (1304–1374), who conceived the idea of a European "Dark Age". From Cycle of Famous Men and Women, Andrea di Bartolo di Bargilla, c. 1450

The Dark Ages is a term for the Early Middle Ages (c. 5th–10th centuries), or occasionally the entire Middle Ages (c. 5th–15th centuries), in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which characterises it as marked by economic, intellectual, and cultural decline.

The concept of a "Dark Age" as a historiographical periodization originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as "dark" compared to the "light" of classical antiquity.[1][2] The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's supposed darkness (ignorance and error) with earlier and later periods of light (knowledge and understanding).[1] The phrase Dark Age(s) itself derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, originally applied by Caesar Baronius in 1602 when he referred to a tumultuous period in the 10th and 11th centuries.[3][4] The concept thus came to characterize the entire Middle Ages as a time of intellectual darkness in Europe between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, and became especially popular during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment.[1] Others, however, have used the term to denote the relative scarcity of records regarding at least the early part of the Middle Ages.

As the accomplishments of the era came to be better understood in the 19th and the 20th centuries, scholars began restricting the Dark Ages appellation to the Early Middle Ages (c. 5th–10th century);[1][5][6] today's scholars maintain this posture.[7] The majority of modern scholars avoid the term altogether because of its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate.[8][9][10][11][12] Despite this, Petrarch's pejorative meaning remains in use,[13][14][15] particularly in popular culture, which often simplistically views the Middle Ages as a time of violence and backwardness.[16][17]

  1. ^ a b c d Theodor Ernst Mommsen (1959). "Petrarch's Conception of the 'Dark Ages'". Medieval And Renaissance Studies. Cornell University Press. pp. 106–129.. Reprinted from: Mommsen, Theodore Ernst (1942). "Petrarch's Conception of the 'Dark Ages'". Speculum. 17 (2). Cambridge MA: Medieval Academy of America: 227–228. doi:10.2307/2856364. JSTOR 2856364. S2CID 161360211.
  2. ^ Thompson, Bard (1996). Humanists and Reformers: A History of the Renaissance and Reformation. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. p. 13. ISBN 978-0-8028-6348-5. Petrarch was the very first to speak of the Middle Ages as a dark age, one that separated him from the riches and pleasures of classical antiquity and that broke the connection between his own age and the civilization of the Greeks and the Romans.
  3. ^ Dwyer, John C. (1998). Church History: Twenty Centuries of Catholic Christianity. New York: Paulist Press. p. 155. ISBN 9780809126866.
  4. ^ Baronius, Caesar. Annales Ecclesiastici, Vol. X. Roma, 1602, p. 647
  5. ^ Ker, W. P. (1904). The Dark Ages. New York: C. Scribner's Sons. p. 1. The Dark Ages and the Middle Ages — or the Middle Age — used to be the same; two names for the same period. But they have come to be distinguished, and the Dark Ages are now no more than the first part of the Middle Age, while the term mediaeval is often restricted to the later centuries, about 1100 to 1500, the age of chivalry, the time between the first Crusade and the Renaissance. This was not the old view, and it does not agree with the proper meaning of the name.
  6. ^ Rahman, Syed Ziaur (2003). "Were the 'Dark Ages' Really Dark?". Grey Matter. The Co-curricular Journal of Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College. 7 (10). Aligarh Muslim University.
  7. ^ Halsall, Guy (2005). Fouracre, Paul (ed.). The New Cambridge Medieval History: c.500-c.700. Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press. p. 90. In terms of the sources of information available, this is most certainly not a Dark Age.... Over the last century, the sources of evidence have increased dramatically, and the remit of the historian (broadly defined as a student of the past) has expanded correspondingly.
  8. ^ Joseph Gies (1994). Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages. HarperCollins Publishers. p. 2. ISBN 9780060165901. In the course of recent decades, the very expression 'Dark Ages' has fallen into disrepute among historians.
  9. ^ Snyder, Christopher A. (1998). An Age of Tyrants: Britain and the Britons A.D. 400–600. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. xiii–xiv. ISBN 0-271-01780-5.. In explaining his approach to writing the work, Snyder refers to the "so-called Dark Ages" and notes, "Historians and archaeologists have never liked the label Dark Ages... there are numerous indicators that these centuries were neither 'dark' nor 'barbarous' in comparison with other eras."
  10. ^ Verdun, Kathleen (2004). "Medievalism". In Jordan, Chester William (ed.). Dictionary of the Middle Ages. Vol. Supplement 1. Charles Scribner. pp. 389–397. ISBN 9780684806426.; Same volume, Freedman, Paul, "Medieval Studies", pp. 383–389.
  11. ^ Raico, Ralph (30 November 2006). "The European Miracle". Archived from the original on 3 September 2011. Retrieved 14 August 2011. "The stereotype of the Middle Ages as 'the Dark Ages' fostered by Renaissance humanists and Enlightenment philosophes has, of course, long since been abandoned by scholars."
  12. ^ Magazine, Smithsonian; Sweeney, Naoíse Mac. "The Myth of the 'Dark Ages' Ignores How Classical Traditions Flourished Around the World". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2023-09-05.
  13. ^ Oxford English Dictionary. Vol. 4 (2 ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. 1989. p. 251.
  14. ^ "Definition of DARK AGE". www.merriam-webster.com. Archived from the original on 2020-11-12. Retrieved 2020-11-29.
  15. ^ Franklin, James (1982). "The Renaissance Myth". Quadrant. 26 (11): 51–60. Archived from the original on 2020-11-29. Retrieved 2008-12-10.
  16. ^ Tainter, Joseph A. (1999). "Post Collapse Societies". In Barker, Graeme (ed.). Companion Encyclopedia of Archaeology. Abingdon, England: Routledge. p. 988. ISBN 0-415-06448-1.
  17. ^ *Nelson, Janet (Spring 2007). "The Dark Ages". History Workshop Journal. 63: 196–98. doi:10.1093/hwj/dbm006. ISSN 1477-4569.

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