Editing Dark Ages (historiography) (section)

==History==
{{Further|Late antiquity|Fall of the Western Roman Empire|Migration Period|Early Middle Ages}}
{{See also|Medievalism}}

===Petrarch===
[[File:Tommaso.Laureti Triumph.of.Christianity.jpg|thumb|''Triumph of Christianity'' by [[Tommaso Laureti]] (1530&ndash;1602), ceiling painting in the [[Raphael Rooms#Sala di Costantino|Sala di Constantino]], [[Vatican City|Vatican Palace]]. Images like this one celebrate the triumph of Christianity over the [[paganism]] of Antiquity.]]

The idea of a Dark Age originated with the [[History of Tuscany|Tuscan]] scholar [[Petrarch]] in the 1330s.<ref name="Franklin"/><ref name=mommsen>{{cite journal | last = Mommsen | first = Theodore E.| author-link =Theodor Ernst Mommsen | title = Petrarch's Conception of the 'Dark Ages' | journal = [[Speculum (journal)|Speculum]] | volume = 17 | issue = 2 | pages = 226–242 | publisher = [[Medieval Academy of America]] | location = Cambridge MA | year = 1942 | jstor = 2856364| doi = 10.2307/2856364| s2cid = 161360211}}</ref> 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".<ref>[[Petrarch]] (1367). ''Apologia cuiusdam anonymi Galli calumnias'' (''Defence against the calumnies of an anonymous Frenchman''), in Petrarch, ''Opera Omnia'', Basel, 1554, p. 1195. This quotation comes from the English translation of Mommsen's article, where the source is given in a footnote. Cf. also Marsh, D, ed., (2003), ''Invectives'', Harvard University Press, p. 457.</ref> Christian writers, including Petrarch himself,<ref name=mommsen/> had long used traditional [[metaphor]]s of '[[light versus darkness]]' to describe '[[Good and evil|good versus evil]]'. Petrarch was the first to give the metaphor [[secularity|secular]] meaning by reversing its application. 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.<ref name=mommsen/>

From his perspective on the Italian peninsula, Petrarch saw the [[Roman period]] and classical antiquity as an expression of greatness.<ref name=mommsen/> He spent much of his time traveling through Europe, rediscovering and republishing classic [[Latin]] and [[Greek language|Greek]] texts. He wanted to restore the Latin language to its former purity. [[Renaissance humanists]] saw the preceding 900 years as a time of stagnation, with history unfolding not along the religious outline of [[Augustine of Hippo|Saint Augustine]]'s [[Six Ages of the World]], but in ''cultural'' (or secular) terms through progressive development of [[classical idealism|classical ideals]], [[classical Literature|literature]], and [[classical art|art]].

Petrarch wrote that history had two periods: the classic period of [[Ancient Greece|Greeks]] and [[Ancient Rome|Romans]], followed by a time of darkness in which he saw himself living. In around 1343, in the conclusion of his epic ''[[Africa (Petrarch)|Africa]]'', he wrote: "My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms. But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age. This sleep of forgetfulness will not last forever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance."<ref>[[Petrarch]] (1343). ''[[Africa (Petrarch)|Africa]]'', IX, 451-7 (ed. Festa, p. 278):<br>''... Michi degere vitam<br>Impositum varia rerum turbante procella.<br>At tibi fortassis, si – quod mens sperat et optat –<br>Es post me victura diu, meliora supersunt<br>Secula: non omnes veniet Letheus in annos<br>Iste sopor! Poterunt discussis forte tenebris<br>Ad purum priscumque iubar remeare nepotes.''<br>(This quotation and its English translation is from Mommsen's article, p. 240. The typographical error of ''inbar'' instead of ''iubar'' has been corrected.)</ref> In the 15th century, historians [[Leonardo Bruni]] and [[Flavio Biondo]] developed a three-tier outline of history. They used Petrarch's two ages, plus a modern, 'better age', which they believed the world had entered. Later, the term 'Middle Ages' – Latin ''media tempestas'' (1469) or ''medium aevum'' (1604), was used to describe the period of supposed decline.<ref name="Albrow">Albrow, Martin, ''The global age: state and society beyond modernity'' (1997), p. 205.</ref>

===Reformation===
During the [[Protestant Reformation|Reformations]] of the 16th and 17th centuries, [[Protestant]]s generally had a similar view to Renaissance humanists such as Petrarch, but also added an [[anti-Catholicism|anti-Catholic]] perspective. They saw classical antiquity as a golden time not only because of its Latin literature but also because it witnessed the beginnings of Christianity. They promoted the idea that the 'Middle Age' was a time of darkness also because of corruption within the [[Catholic Church]], such as popes ruling as kings, veneration of [[Relic|saints' relics]], a licentious priesthood and institutionalized moral hypocrisy.<ref>F. Oakley, ''The medieval experience: foundations of Western cultural singularity'' (University of Toronto Press, 1988), pp. 1-4.</ref>

===Baronius===
In response to the [[Protestantism|Protestants]], [[Catholicity|Catholic]]s developed a counter-image to depict the [[High Middle Ages]] in particular as a period of social and religious harmony and not 'dark' at all.<ref>[[Philip Daileader|Daileader, Philip]] (2001). ''The High Middle Ages''. The Teaching Company. {{ISBN|1-56585-827-1}}. "Catholics living during the Protestant Reformation were not going to take this assault lying down. They, too, turned to the study of the Middle Ages, going back to prove that, far from being a period of religious corruption, the Middle Ages were superior to the era of the Protestant Reformation, because the Middle Ages were free of the religious schisms and religious wars that were plaguing the 16th and 17th centuries."</ref> The most important Catholic reply to the ''[[Magdeburg Centuries]]'' was the ''[[Annales Ecclesiastici]]'' by Cardinal [[Caesar Baronius]]. Baronius was a trained historian who produced a work that the ''[[Encyclopædia Britannica]]'' in 1911 described as "far surpassing anything before"<ref>{{cite EB1911 |wstitle=History |volume=13} |page=530 |first=James Thomson |last=Shotwell}}</ref> and that [[John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton|Acton]] regarded as "the greatest history of the Church ever written".<ref>[[John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton|Lord Acton]] (1906). ''[[s:Lectures on Modern History|Lectures on Modern History]]'', p. 121.</ref> The ''Annales'' covered the first twelve centuries of Christianity to 1198 and was published in twelve volumes between 1588 and 1607. It was in Volume X that Baronius coined the term "dark age" for the period between the end of the [[Carolingian Empire]] in 888<ref>Baronius's actual starting-point for the "dark age" was 900 (''annus Redemptoris nongentesimus''), but that was an arbitrary rounding off that was due mainly to his strictly [[annalists|annalistic]] approach. Later historians,m such as Marco Porri in his Catholic ''History of the Church'' [http://contemplativinelmondo.splinder.com (''Storia della Chiesa'')] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110716120451/http://contemplativinelmondo.splinder.com/ |date=2011-07-16 }} and the Lutheran ''Christian Cyclopedia'' [http://www.lcms.org/ca/www/cyclopedia/02/display.asp?t1=s&word=SAECULUMOBSCURUM ("Saeculum Obscurum")] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091019080028/http://www.lcms.org/ca/www/cyclopedia/02/display.asp?t1=s&word=SAECULUMOBSCURUM |date=2009-10-19 }}, have tended to amend it to the more historically significant date of 888 and often rounded it down further to 880. The first weeks of 888 witnessed both the final break-up of the Carolingian Empire and the death of its deposed ruler [[Charles the Fat]]. Unlike the end of the Carolingian Empire, however, the end of the [[Carolingian Renaissance]] cannot be precisely dated, and it was the latter development that was responsible for the "lack of writers" that Baronius, as a historian, found so irksome.</ref> and the first stirrings of [[Gregorian Reform]] under [[Pope Clement II]] in 1046:

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em; clear:right;"
|+ Volumes of ''Patrologia Latina'' per century<ref>[[Philip Schaff|Schaff, Philip]] (1882). ''History of the Christian Church, Vol. IV: Mediaeval Christianity, A.D. 570–1073'', Ch. XIII, §138. [http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/hcc4.i.xiii.v.html "Prevailing Ignorance in the Western Church"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110809144844/http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/hcc4.i.xiii.v.html |date=2011-08-09 }}</ref>
! Century !! Volumes !!{{No.}} of
volumes
|- style="text-align:right"
| 7th || 80–88 || 8
|- style="text-align:right"
| 8th || 89–96 || 7
|- style="text-align:right"
| 9th || 97–130 || 33
|- style="text-align:right"
| 10th || 131–138 || 7
|- style="text-align:right"
| 11th || 139–151 || 12
|- style="text-align:right"
| 12th || 152–191 || 39
|- style="text-align:right"
| 13th || 192–217 || 25
|}

{{blockquote|"The new age (''saeculum'') that was beginning, for its harshness and barrenness of good could well be called iron, for its baseness and abounding evil leaden, and moreover for its lack of writers (''inopia scriptorum'') dark (''obscurum'')".<ref>[[Caesar Baronius|Baronius, Caesar]] (1602). ''[[Annales Ecclesiastici]]'', Vol. X. Roma, p. 647. "...nouum inchoatur saeculum, quod sui asperitate ac boni sterilitate ferreum, malique exundantis deformitate plumbeum, atque inopia scriptorum appellari consueuit obscurum."</ref>}}

Significantly, Baronius termed the age 'dark' because of the paucity of written records. The "lack of writers" he referred to may be illustrated by comparing the number of volumes in [[Jacques Paul Migne|Migne]]'s ''[[Patrologia Latina]]'' containing the work of Latin writers from the 10th century (the heart of the age he called 'dark') with the number containing the work of writers from the preceding and succeeding centuries. A minority of these writers were historians.

[[File:European Output of Manuscripts 500–1500.png|thumb|upright=1.2|Medieval production of manuscripts.<ref>Buringh, Eltjo; van Zanden, Jan Luiten: "Charting the "Rise of the West": Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries", ''The Journal of Economic History'', Vol. 69, No. 2 (2009), pp.&nbsp;409–445 (416, table 1)</ref> The beginning of the Middle Ages was also a period of low activity in copying. This graph does not include the [[Byzantine Empire]].]]

There is a sharp drop from 34 volumes in the 9th century to just 8 in the 10th. The 11th century, with 13, evidences a certain recovery, and the 12th century, with 40, surpasses the 9th, something that the 13th, with just 26, fails to do. There was indeed a 'dark age', in Baronius's sense of a "lack of writers", between the [[Carolingian Renaissance]] in the 9th century and the beginnings, sometime in the 11th, of what has been called the [[Renaissance of the 12th century]]. Furthermore, there was an earlier period of "lack of writers" during the 7th and 8th centuries. Therefore, in Western Europe, two 'dark ages' can be identified, separated by the brilliant but brief Carolingian Renaissance.

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 ''{{lang|la|saeculum obscurum}}'' being reserved for the period to which he had applied it. Some, following Baronius, used 'dark age' neutrally to refer to a dearth of written records, but others used it pejoratively and lapsed into that lack of objectivity that has discredited the term for many modern historians.

The first British historian to use the term was most likely [[Gilbert Burnet]], in the form 'darker ages' which appears several times in his work during the later 17th century. The earliest reference seems to be in the "Epistle Dedicatory" to Volume I of ''The History of the Reformation of the Church of England'' of 1679, where he writes: "The design of the reformation was to restore Christianity to what it was at first, and to purge it of those corruptions, with which it was overrun in the later and darker ages."<ref>[[Gilbert Burnet|Burnet, Gilbert]] (1679). ''The History of the Reformation of the Church of England'', Vol. I. Oxford, 1929, p. ii.</ref> He uses it again in the 1682 Volume II, where he dismisses the story of "St George's fighting with the dragon" as "a legend formed in the darker ages to support the humour of chivalry".<ref>[[Gilbert Burnet|Burnet, Gilbert]] (1682). ''The History of the Reformation of the Church of England'', Vol. II. Oxford, 1829, p. 423. Burnet also uses the term in 1682 in ''The Abridgement of the History of the Reformation of the Church of England'' (2nd Edition, London, 1683, p. 52) and in 1687 in ''Travels through France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland'' (London, 1750, p. 257). The ''[[Oxford English Dictionary]]'' erroneously cites the last of these as the earliest recorded use of the term in English.</ref> Burnet was a bishop chronicling how England became Protestant, and his use of the term is invariably pejorative.

===Enlightenment===
During the [[Age of Enlightenment]] of the 17th and 18th centuries, many critical thinkers saw religion as antithetical to reason. For them the Middle Ages, or "Age of Faith", was therefore the opposite of the [[Age of Enlightenment|Age of Reason]].<ref>[[Robert Bartlett (historian)|Bartlett, Robert]] (2001). "Introduction: Perspectives on the Medieval World", in ''Medieval Panorama''. {{ISBN|0-89236-642-7}}. "Disdain about the medieval past was especially forthright amongst the critical and rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment. For them the Middle Ages epitomized the barbaric, priest-ridden world they were attempting to transform."</ref> [[Baruch Spinoza]], [[Bernard Fontenelle]], [[Immanuel Kant]], [[David Hume]], [[Thomas Jefferson]], [[Thomas Paine]], [[Denis Diderot]],
[[Voltaire]], [[Marquis De Sade]] and [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]] were vocal in attacking the Middle Ages as a period of social regress dominated by religion, while [[Edward Gibbon|Gibbon]] in ''[[The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire]]'' expressed contempt for the "rubbish of the Dark Ages".<ref>[[Edward Gibbon|Gibbon, Edward]] (1788). ''The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'', Vol. 6, Ch. XXXVII, paragraph 619.</ref> Yet just as Petrarch, seeing himself at the cusp of a "new age", was criticising the centuries before his own time, so too were Enlightenment writers.

Consequently, an evolution had occurred in at least three ways. Petrarch's original metaphor of light versus dark has expanded over time, implicitly at least. Even if later humanists no longer saw themselves living in a ''dark'' age, their times were still not ''light'' enough for 18th-century writers who saw themselves as living in the ''real'' Age of Enlightenment, while the period to be condemned stretched to include what we now call [[Early Modern]] times. 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 [[Antireligion|anti-religious]] and [[anti-clericalism|anti-clerical]] meaning.

===Romanticism===
In the late 18th and the early 19th centuries, the [[Romanticism|Romantics]] reversed the negative assessment of Enlightenment critics with a vogue for [[medievalism]].<ref>Alexander, Michael (2007). ''Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England''. Yale University Press.</ref> The word "[[Goths|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. This stimulated interest in the Middle Ages, which for the following generation began to take on the idyllic image of an "Age of Faith". This, reacting to a world dominated by Enlightenment [[rationalism]], expressed a romantic view of a [[Golden Age]] of [[chivalry]].  The Middle Ages were seen with [[nostalgia]] as a period of social and environmental harmony and spiritual inspiration, in contrast to the excesses of the [[French Revolution]] and, most of all, to the environmental and social upheavals and [[utilitarianism (architecture)|utilitarianism]] of the developing [[Industrial Revolution]].<ref>Chandler, Alice K. (1971). ''A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature''. University of Nebraska Press, p. 4.</ref> The Romantics' view is still represented in modern-day [[Renaissance fair|fairs and festivals]] celebrating the period with '[[Merry England|merrie]]' costumes and events.

Just as Petrarch had twisted the meaning of light and darkness, the Romantics had twisted the judgment of the Enlightenment.{{Citation needed|date=September 2023}} However, the period that they idealized was largely the [[High Middle Ages]], extending into [[Early modern period|Early Modern]] times. In one respect, that negated the religious aspect of Petrarch's judgment, since these later centuries were those when the power and prestige of the Church were at their height. To many, the scope of the Dark Ages was becoming divorced from this period, denoting mainly the centuries immediately following the fall of Rome.