Editing Dark Ages (historiography) (section)

===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.