Dark Ages (historiography)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Dark Ages is a term that most historians have now abandoned, yet it remains one of the most persistent labels in popular culture. It was born not from careful scholarship but from the wounded pride of a 14th-century Italian poet who believed his own era was superior to everything that came before the fall of Rome. That poet was Petrarch, and the idea he planted in the 1330s would grow, mutate, and outlast centuries of scholarly revision.

  What does it mean to call an age "dark"? The answer has shifted dramatically depending on who was asking and why. For some, darkness meant ignorance and cultural backwardness. For others, it simply meant a shortage of written records. And for still others, the label was a weapon in religious and political arguments that had nothing to do with the early medieval period at all.

  The questions this documentary will pursue are not just about the Middle Ages themselves. They are about how historians, polemicists, Romantics, and ordinary people have used a single charged phrase to say things about power, religion, progress, and identity across seven centuries.

• 2. Petrarch's Reversal

  ›

  Petrarch was a Tuscan scholar, and in the 1330s he turned a long-standing Christian metaphor on its head. For centuries, Christian writers had used the imagery of light and darkness to separate good from evil, and they had cast classical antiquity in the darkness because it lacked Christianity. Petrarch reversed this. He saw classical Rome and Greece in the light of their cultural achievements, and he cast his own era in darkness for failing to match them.

  His writing captures the bitterness of a man who felt surrounded by intellectual fog. He wrote that amidst the errors of his time, men of genius had shone forth, though they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom. This was not a detached scholarly assessment. It was a lament.

  From his vantage point on the Italian peninsula, Petrarch spent much of his life traveling through Europe, tracking down and republishing classical Latin and Greek texts. He wanted to restore the Latin language to its former purity. In around 1343, in the conclusion of his epic Africa, he imagined a future reader living in a better age: he wrote of a sleep of forgetfulness that would not last forever, and of descendants who would return to the former pure radiance once the darkness had dispersed.

  Historians Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo extended his framework in the 15th century, adding a third tier to his two-part history. They kept Petrarch's classical age and dark age, then added a modern age of recovery, which they believed had already arrived. The word 'Middle Ages' came later still, from the Latin media tempestas, which first appeared in 1469.

• 3. A Catholic Coin

  ›

  The phrase that would become the standard English term was actually coined by a Catholic cardinal responding to Protestant critics of the Church. Cardinal Caesar Baronius published his massive Annales Ecclesiastici across twelve volumes between 1588 and 1607, covering the first twelve centuries of Christianity up to 1198. The Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1911 described the work as far surpassing anything before it, and the historian Acton called it the greatest history of the Church ever written.

  Baronius coined the Latin saeculum obscurum, meaning dark age, in Volume X of that work. He applied it not to the entire medieval period but to a specific stretch running from the end of the Carolingian Empire in 888 to the first stirrings of Gregorian Reform under Pope Clement II in 1046. His reasons were scholarly, not polemical. He wrote that the new age could well be called iron for its harshness, leaden for its abounding evil, and dark for its lack of writers.

  That phrase, lack of writers, is the key. Baronius was pointing to something measurable. The volumes of Migne's Patrologia Latina, the great collection of Latin Christian writings, show a dramatic fall from around 34 volumes of text produced in the 9th century to just 8 in the 10th century. The 11th century recovers to about 13, and the 12th century surges to roughly 40. By this measure, two distinct dark ages can actually be identified in Western Europe: one during the 7th and 8th centuries, and one between the Carolingian Renaissance of the 9th century and the beginnings of the 12th-century Renaissance.

  Gilbert Burnet, probably the first British historian to adopt the term, used the phrase 'darker ages' in his 1679 History of the Reformation of the Church of England. Burnet was a bishop narrating England's turn toward Protestantism, and his use of the phrase was invariably scornful.

• 4. The Enlightenment's Weapon

  ›

  Baruch Spinoza, Bernard Fontenelle, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Denis Diderot, Voltaire, the Marquis De Sade, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all attacked the Middle Ages as a period of social regress dominated by religion. To Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, the medieval era was the Age of Faith, which made it the direct opposite of what they called the Age of Reason.

  Edward Gibbon, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, expressed contempt for what he dismissed as the rubbish of the Dark Ages. These writers were not neutral analysts. Like Petrarch before them, they were positioning themselves at the dawn of a new and superior age, which required them to paint what came earlier as inferior.

  Something had shifted in the accusation, though. Petrarch had used darkness mainly to deplore a lack of secular cultural achievement. The Enlightenment writers sharpened that into something more explicitly anti-religious and anti-clerical. The condemnation also stretched further back in time. If Enlightenment thinkers were now the truly enlightened ones, then the Early Modern period before them was not light enough either, and the period to be condemned expanded accordingly.

• 5. Romantics and Revisionists

  ›

  The Romantics of the late 18th and early 19th centuries did not so much correct the Dark Ages myth as flip it into something equally distorted. For them, the Middle Ages became an idealized Age of Faith, a Golden Age of chivalry and social harmony set against the upheavals of the French Revolution and the grinding realities of the Industrial Revolution.

  Horace Walpole was among the mid-18th-century English figures who helped launch the Gothic Revival in the arts. The word Gothic had previously been an insult, roughly equivalent to vandal. What had been a term of abuse became a term of romantic longing. The Romantics' nostalgia for medieval life persists in modern-day fairs and festivals celebrating the period with what they promote as 'merrie' costumes and events.

  Scholarly revision came more slowly. In 1860, Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy still drew a sharp contrast between the medieval dark ages and an enlightened Renaissance. The Oxford English Dictionary first capitalized 'Dark Ages' in Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization in England in 1857, where he wrote that during these, which are rightly called the Dark Ages, the clergy were supreme. The OED itself defined an uncapitalized 'dark ages' in 1894 as a term applied to the Middle Ages to mark the intellectual darkness characteristic of the time.

  But by 1977, the historian Denys Hay was already speaking ironically of the lively centuries which we call dark. A 2007 book about German literary history went further, describing the dark ages as a popular if uninformed manner of speaking.

• 6. The Label in Modern Life

  ›

  A 2021 lecture by Howard Williams of Chester University found that 'Dark Ages' remains rife outside academic literature, appearing regularly in newspaper articles and media debates. Williams argued that legends and racial misunderstandings have been revitalized by modern nationalists, colonialists, and imperialists who appropriate historical myths for arguments about identity, faith, and origin.

  Andrew B. R. Elliott, writing in a 2017 book about medievalisms in popular culture, found that by far the most common use of 'Dark Ages' in daily life is to signal a general sense of backwardness or technological insufficiency. Referring to an insurance industry still reliant on paper as being in the Dark Ages has nothing to do with the 5th century. Elliott connects this pattern to what he calls the Myth of Progress, also examined by Joseph Tainter, who argues that society normally does not traverse from lesser to greater complexity in a straight line; periods of reduced complexity are common and to be expected, not signs of catastrophic failure.

  Peter S. Wells, in his 2008 book Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered, argued that the centuries from the 5th through the 9th were in fact a time of dynamic development, cultural creativity, and long-distance networking. Wells traced the staying power of the opposite view to Edward Gibbon's portrait of barbarian invaders, which he said had been accepted by many who read and admired Gibbon's work.

  Robert Sallares offered a more measured defense of the term in his work on the plague pandemic of 541 to 750, arguing that when sources are simply absent, 'dark' remains an appropriate descriptor. But scholars like John Blair, Stephen Rippon, and Christopher Smart countered in 2020 that the days of calling the 5th through the 10th centuries the Dark Ages are long gone, and that the material culture of that period demonstrates a high degree of sophistication.