All over the world and in Europe, a thousand things were happening. In my belief, according to this description the Dark Ages were not dark at all, and if present, the intellectual depression was minimal. They weren't called the Dark Ages because the sun didn't shine. Written by an academic whose area of expertise was the period 350 to 650 this tries to lay out as fact a coherent history for the period. Both Roman and Greek civilisations had provided the world with contributions to art, science, philosophy, … Delve into this time in medieval Britain with our guide to the Dark Ages, plus the best sites to visit Britain's Dark Ages were an age of migration and invasion, of religious and political upheaval, and its traces can still be read in the landscape today. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 199. While Petrarch's concept of a Dark Age corresponded to a mostly Christian period following pre-Christian Rome, today the term mainly applies to the cultures and periods in Europe that were least Christianized, and thus most sparsely covered by chronicles and other contemporary sources, at the time mostly written by Catholic clergy. Baronius' 'dark age' seems to have struck historians, for it was in the 17th century that the term started to spread to various European languages, with his original Latin term saeculum obscurum being reserved for the period he had applied it to. But while some, following Baronius, used 'dark age' neutrally to refer to a dearth of written records, others used it pejoratively, lapsing into that lack of objectivity that has discredited the term for many modern historians. The Dark Ages were also the years of vast Muslim conquests. Generally, the Dark Ages referred to the period of time ushered in by the fall of the Western Roman Empire. [32] The word "Gothic" had been a term of opprobrium akin to "Vandal" until a few self-confident mid-18th-century English "Goths" like Horace Walpole initiated the Gothic Revival in the arts. Klaus Anselm Vogel, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, "Prevailing Ignorance in the Western Church", Project: Exploring the Early Holocene Occupation of North-Central Anatolia: New Approaches for Studying Archaeological Dark Ages, "Why the Middle Ages are called the Dark Ages", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dark_Ages_(historiography)&oldid=998565914, Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica with Wikisource reference, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with unsourced statements from July 2008, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 6 January 2021, at 00:08. Additionally, Petrarch's metaphor of darkness, which he used mainly to deplore what he saw as a lack of secular achievement, was sharpened to take on a more explicitly anti-religious and anti-clerical meaning. A minority of these writers were historians. Orthodox Christians regarded this time as a period of Catholic corruption; they repudiated the ways of the Catholic Church with its papal doctrines and hierarchy. Orthodox Christians strove to recreate a pure Christianity, void of these “dark” Catholic ways. Often the term Dark Ages refers to the initial five hundred years following the fall of Rome in 476. A recent study of medieval concepts of the sphericity of the Earth notes that "since the eighth century, no cosmographer worthy of note has called into question the sphericity of the Earth." Guide to Britain’s Dark Ages: when they were, historical facts and best sites to visit. [3] The concept of a "Dark Age" originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as "dark" compared to the "light" of classical antiquity. [13][16] Writing of the past, 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". When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance. The International History Review Volume 26, 2004 - Issue 1, Globalisation, Ecological Crisis, and Dark Ages, Sing C. Chew, Journal of Global Society, Volume 16, 2002 - Issue 4. The article cites that the Dark Ages, in its most popular meaning, is used to denote the period in which there was an intellectual depression in the European history that corresponds with the Middle Ages. Experts believe that Homer lived in the 9 th century and can be seen as a figure from the Dark Age. For them the Middle Ages, or "Age of Faith", was therefore the opposite of the Age of Reason. Today, however, it is more common to separate the two—dating the Dark Ages to the tenth century—or to not even use the term “Dark Ages” at all. In around 1343, in the conclusion of his epic Africa, he wrote: "My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms. 1. The Dark Ages are described as a period of intellectual depression in the history of Europe from the establishment of barbarian supremacy in the fifth century to the revival of learning at about the fifteenth century. From his perspective on the Italian peninsula, Petrarch saw the Roman period and classical antiquity as an expression of greatness. [36] More forcefully, a book about the history of German literature published in 2007 describes "the dark ages" as "a popular if uninformed manner of speaking". History is full of people talking about how they are living in a ‘dark time’ or in ‘age of light’ – it is an easy metaphor to explain that you are living in good or bad times. [59] Lindberg and Ronald Numbers write: "There was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference". They saw classical antiquity as a golden time, not only because of its Latin literature, but also because it witnessed the beginnings of Christianity. It ha been widely criticised by historians for relying heavily on interpretation but at least Morris gives us A version of history. It is an individual darkness, which multiplies and grows as those who reject God walk together and dominate politics, education, and society. The six and a half centuries between the end of Roman rule around 410 and the Norman Conquest of 1066, represent the most important period in English history. Question: "What were the Dark Ages?" AD 476 was the time of this event.Initially, this era took on the term “dark” by later onlookers; this was due to the backward ways and practices that seemed to prevail during this time. On September 28, 235, Pope Pontian became the first pope to resign his office, only to live out his days exiled to the mines of Sardinia! This’ll Kill Your Appetite. The First Dark Age in Egypt! 32. During the Age of Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, many critical thinkers saw religion as antithetical to reason. Along with other nomads and horse and camel warriors, the Muslims rode through the fallen empire, wreaking havoc and seeding intellectual and social heresy in their wake. [10][11][12] Petrarch's pejorative meaning remains in use,[1][2][13] typically in popular culture which often mischaracterises the Middle Ages as a time of violence and backwardness. 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