I respectfully dissent from this narrative— popular in academic circles now—that the dark ages were not dark. I feel that view was born of the academic need to always say something different about the past, not any new evidence. Nobody, after all, is going to award you tenure for publishing an article that says, “on further examination…the Middle Ages were awful.” I also think there’s a bit of straw man arguing going on. “Dark” in these arguments is given a cartoonishly broad definition. To mean nothing of interest was created at all. And then any evidence of any artistic output, however mediocre, “disproves” it. E.g.:”voila! a colorful cartoon panel from the late Middle Ages!” In fact, the renaissance writers who first labeled the Middle Ages as “dark” were perfectly aware of all the “flat” religious iconography and “magical” thinking of that period. That was their point. Compared to Greece and Rome, and what they themselves were doing in art and architecture, the output of that 1000 years was poor. The images lacked perspective because people had forgotten how to do that, not because religious thinking required it. People engaged in more mystical thinking because scientific knowledge was lost after the collapse of Rome. Literacy plummeted too, to the point where hardly anyone outside a monastery could read or write. I’d call that a dark age. And anyone looking to relabel that period has to do more than dig up a painting or two. To lose the dark label you have to show the Middle Ages were equal to Greece, Rome, and the modern period. Good luck with that. Also: we are obviously taking only about Europe in that 1000 years here. That is all the Renaissance thinkers meant too when they created that label. This is an inherently euro-centric debate. So, it is not wrong to continue to use “dark age” about Western Europe at that time just because the Muslim world was flourishing. Which it was. I believe Europe’s biggest export at the time was slaves: mostly to North Africa. Because it was a dark age in Europe, but not in, say, Alexandria. So, yes, some interesting things were made during the Dark Ages in Europe, but not enough to make that label inaccurate.
I respectfully dissent from this narrative— popular in academic circles now—that the dark ages were not dark. I feel that view was born of the academic need to always say something different about the past, not any new evidence. Nobody, after all, is going to award you tenure for publishing an article that says, “on further examination…the Middle Ages were awful.” I also think there’s a bit of straw man arguing going on. “Dark” in these arguments is given a cartoonishly broad definition. To mean nothing of interest was created at all. And then any evidence of any artistic output, however mediocre, “disproves” it. E.g.:”voila! a colorful cartoon panel from the late Middle Ages!” In fact, the renaissance writers who first labeled the Middle Ages as “dark” were perfectly aware of all the “flat” religious iconography and “magical” thinking of that period. That was their point. Compared to Greece and Rome, and what they themselves were doing in art and architecture, the output of that 1000 years was poor. The images lacked perspective because people had forgotten how to do that, not because religious thinking required it. People engaged in more mystical thinking because scientific knowledge was lost after the collapse of Rome. Literacy plummeted too, to the point where hardly anyone outside a monastery could read or write. I’d call that a dark age. And anyone looking to relabel that period has to do more than dig up a painting or two. To lose the dark label you have to show the Middle Ages were equal to Greece, Rome, and the modern period. Good luck with that. Also: we are obviously taking only about Europe in that 1000 years here. That is all the Renaissance thinkers meant too when they created that label. This is an inherently euro-centric debate. So, it is not wrong to continue to use “dark age” about Western Europe at that time just because the Muslim world was flourishing. Which it was. I believe Europe’s biggest export at the time was slaves: mostly to North Africa. Because it was a dark age in Europe, but not in, say, Alexandria. So, yes, some interesting things were made during the Dark Ages in Europe, but not enough to make that label inaccurate.