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User:Peter Damian/Dark Ages

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Suggestions for re-draft

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  • Begin with the modern scholarly use of the term, to cover the period c550-750 in the Latin West. Mention that it is often used in a qualified sense, and cautiously, because of the value judgment implied.
  • 'Dark' in two senses, the first reflecting our lack of knowledge of the period, thus dark from our viewpoint, the second, that this period (in the West) was culturally unenlightened, not possessing many or most of the great works of classical antiquity.
  • The term is in retreat, originally applying to the whole of the medieval period (550-1400), then to the period 550-1000, ignoring the Carolingian Renaissance of the eighth century.
  • It is still in popular use as a term to cover the whole of the Middle ages

In the rest of the article

  • Add material showing why the pre-Carolingian period (in the West, naturally) can justifiably be characterised as dark.
  • Trim down the excessive amounts on Plutarch.
  • Add some material on medieval studies in the early modern period (such as by Hamilton in the eighteenth century
  • Nineteenth century medievalism

Reference works

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  • Dark Ages: The early medieval period of Western European history. Specifically, the term refers to the time (476-800) when there was no Roman (or Holy Roman) emperor in the West, or, more generally, to the period between about 500 and 1000, which was marked by frequent warfare and a virtual disappearance of urban life. It is now rarely used by historians because of the value judgment it implies. Though sometimes taken to derive its meaning from the fact that little was then known about the period, the term’s more usual and pejorative sense is of a period of intellectual darkness and barbarity. (Britannica 15th edition).
  • Dark Ages: the period of European history from about the 5C to the 11C, regarded as historically obscure and culturally uneventful (Chambers concise dictionary and thesaurus 2001)
  • Dark Ages: A term originally deployed in the 17th and 18th centuries to indicate the intellectual darkness which was believed to have descended on Europe with the ending of the Roman empire until new light was provided by the Renaissance. Since the achievement of the Middle Ages has come to be properly recognised the term has been in retreat, but it still has a stronghold in what should be more appropriately described as the Early Middle Ages (c.400-800). In the field of British history it is sometimes applied just to the 5th and 6th centuries (Oxford Companion to British History).

Scholarly works

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  • The diagram accompanying and illustrating the doctrine shows up already in the second century CE Boethius incorporated it into his writing, and it passed down through the dark ages to the high medieval period, and from thence to today. Diagrams of this sort were popular among late classical and medieval authors, who used them for a variety of purposes. (Similar diagrams for modal propositions were especially popular.) [1]
  • In order to understand how the theory of analogy arose we have to bear in mind the history of education in the Latin-speaking western part of Europe. During the so-called dark ages, learning was largely confined to monasteries, and people had access to very few texts from the ancient world. This situation had changed dramatically by the beginning of the thirteenth century. The first universities (Bologna, Paris, Oxford) had been established, and the recovery of the writings of Aristotle supplemented by the works of Islamic philosophers was well under way. [2]
  • The period in the history of Latin Europe after that of the "Fathers of the Church" has traditionally been called the "dark age", because very few writings were produced then. This was followed by what has sometimes been called "The Carolingian Renaissance", associated with the court of Charlemagne, toward the end of the eighth century. The political writers of the ninth century—Hincmar of Rheims, Rabanus Maurus, Jonas of Orleans etc.—are not household names, yet they gave expression to ideas that were important throughout the rest of the middle ages, in particular ideas about the role of a king and the difference between king and tyrant. [3]
  • Our use of the phrase 'the Dark Ages' to cover the period from 600 to 1000 marks our undue concentration on Western Europe. In China this includes the time of the Tang dynasty , the greatest age of Chinese poetry, and in many other ways a most remarkable epoch. From India to Spain, the brilliant civilisation of Islam flourished. [Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, II.7 'The Papacy in the Dark Ages'
  • The revival of philosophy after the Dark Ages (roughly 525 - 750) was a drawn-out process. (Peter King, 'Philosophy in the Latin Christian West:750-1050', in Gracia and Noone).
  • Many who base their views on a knowledge of Western Europe alone would stress the contrast between the destructive tendencies of the early medieval phase and the constructive tendencies of the later phase. In the scheme, the 'Dark Ages' of the fifth to eleventh centuries are characterised by the progressive dismemberment of the Roman world; the turning point is reached with the so-called 'twelfth-century renaissance'; and the peak of 'high' medieval civilisation is reached in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. These distinctions have little relation to the East, where the Roman Empire survived until 1453, and where no 'renaissance' in the Western sense was every experienced. (Norman Davies, Europe, a history, Oxford 1996, p. 292, chapter 'The Middle Age'.
  • The era of history that Barbarians deals with is sometimes called by the neutral name of the Early Medieval Period (the Early Middle Ages) from AD 300 to 1000 - beginning with the decline and fall of the Western Roman empire and ending with the coming of a new millenium. In England, part of this period (or sometimes even the whole period) has often been called the Dark Ages, an era little known and understood, whose very name embodies this obscurity. [..] The term 'Dark Ages' is a loaded one that can be read in two ways. Firstly, it is seen as dark in the sense that there are few written records to illuminate the period, compared with those before and after it, and writing is understood to be a marker of civilisation. Secondly, the Dark Ages have been portrayed by conventional history as a time of moral, cultural and social decay, precipitated by the collapse of Rome and, therefore, civilisation itself.
  • Many historians prefer not to talk about the Dark Ages at all, and use different terms to describe this period. In Germany it is known as the Age of Migration, or time of Volkerwanderung (wandering peoples), in recognition of the fact that this was a period of great upheaval and change in the make-up of the ethnic map of the continent.
  • Between this time [A.D. 636, marking the death of Isadore of Seville] and the Carolingian renaissance nothing of philosophical importance took place [...] this [Carolingian] period was followed by a dark age which ended with another, more lasting, revival of learning in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. [Gracia, and Gracia and Noone, p2].
  • "The renaissance of letters which Charles the Great inspired marks the end of the dark ages". [A History of the Medieval Church: 590-1500 Margaret Deanesly, Routledge, 1969, orig. pub. 1925, p52]
  • "From the Dark Ages to the Renaissance " - book title, Peter P. Liddel, Mitchell Beazley, 2006
  • In the sixth century C.E., what was left of the greatness of the Roman Empire, and even of classical Greece, gave way in the West to a period of intellectual decline. This used to be called the Dark Ages, but in a modern avoidance of derisive names, many textbooks now refer to this as a period of transition. However, the sixth and seventh centuries were 'darker' in that literacy declined quite severely from the days of the first- and second-century Roman Empire or even the fourth or fifth century. With this decline in literacy cam a comparable and associated decline in written texts. Daily Life in the Age of Charlemagne, John J. Butt, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002 p158.
  • Humanist scholars realized that even the oldest manuscripts discovered in monastic libraries were not at all contemporaneous with the compilations of the antique texts they contained. At best, they were products of the Dark Ages (c. 550-c.750, but many of the manuscripts dated from the ninth and tenh centuries, a period known as the Carolingian Renaissance. [4] The Origins of Old Germanic Studies in the Low Countries, Cornelis Dekker, BRILL, 1999
  • If there is any period for which the term 'Dark Ages' is appropriate, it is that time between the early seventh century and Charlemagne. The Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages, David Leslie Wagner, Indiana University Press, 1983 p21

References in History department pages

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From 18th and 19th century literature

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  • Belief in every kind of prodigy was so established in those dark ages, that an author would not be faithful to the manners of the times, who should omit all mention of them. - Walpole, referring to 1529 [6]
  • Gibbon: "All that learning can extract from the rubbish of the dark ages is copiously stated by Archbishop Usher in his Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates, cap. xvi. p. 425 - 503", chapter 37, apparently referring to early middle ages.
  • Trollope "Let us with eyes wide open see the godly man of four centuries since, the man of the dark ages" (i.e. referring to 1400's) - The Warden chapter 15.
  • "Then followed the Middle Ages; the dark ages, as they are called, though in their darkness were matured those seeds of knowledge, which, in fulness of time, were to spring up into new and more glorious forms of civilization. " William Hickling Prescott, The History of the Conquest of Peru Book II: Discovery Of Peru Chapter I.

References

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