![]() Renaissance humanists saw the preceding 900 years as a time of stagnation, with history unfolding not along the religious outline of Saint Augustine's Six Ages of the World, but in cultural (or secular) terms through progressive development of classical ideals, literature, and art. He wanted to restore the Latin language to its former purity. He spent much of his time traveling through Europe, rediscovering and republishing classic Latin and Greek texts. įrom his perspective on the Italian peninsula, Petrarch saw the Roman period and classical antiquity as an expression of greatness. ![]() He now saw classical antiquity, so long considered a 'dark' age for its lack of Christianity, in the 'light' of its cultural achievements, while Petrarch's own time, allegedly lacking such cultural achievements, was seen as the age of darkness. Petrarch was the first to give the metaphor secular meaning by reversing its application. Christian writers, including Petrarch himself, had long used traditional metaphors of ' light versus darkness' to describe ' good versus evil'. 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". The idea of a Dark Age originated with the Tuscan scholar Petrarch in the 1330s. Images like this one celebrate the triumph of Christianity over the paganism of Antiquity. See also: Medievalism Petrarch Triumph of Christianity by Tommaso Laureti (1530–1602), ceiling painting in the Sala di Constantino, Vatican Palace. Despite this, Petrarch's pejorative meaning remains in use, particularly in popular culture, which often simplistically views the Middle Ages as a time of violence and backwardness. The majority of modern scholars avoid the term altogether due to its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate. 5th–10th century), and today's scholars also reject its usage for the period. Īs 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. ![]() Global cooling led to a decline in crop yields. Others, however, have used the term to denote the relative scarcity of records regarding at least the early part of the Middle Ages. 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 that became especially popular during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment. 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. The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's "darkness" (ignorance and error) with earlier and later periods of 'light' (knowledge and understanding). 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. The Dark Ages is a term for the Early Middle Ages or occasionally the entire Middle Ages, in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire that characterises it as marked by economic, intellectual, and cultural decline. From Cycle of Famous Men and Women, Andrea di Bartolo di Bargilla, c. Petrarch, who conceived the idea of a European "Dark Age". For other uses, see Dark Ages (disambiguation). For Greece after the Late Bronze Age collapse, see Greek Dark Ages. This article is about the concept of a Dark Age in Western Europe after the Fall of the Western Roman Empire.
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