Should the Middle Ages be called the dark age?

Answer 1

1st Answer The Dark Ages, while still interchangeable with the Middle Ages, is historically different. The Dark Ages are typically more associated, academically speaking, to the Early Middle Ages which spans from the fall of Rome to about 1000 AD. 2nd Answer This question is subjective, so perhaps it should get a subjective answer.

Both the terms Middle Ages and Dark Ages are misleading, and personally I think neither should be used.

The idea of the Middle Ages came about because the people after the time wanted to compare themselves favorably with ancient Rome, and did so by denigrating the people who had gone before them.

The idea of the Dark Ages is that people were ignorant.

But a study of the periods that get these names tells me, and other people I know who are educated on the subject, that the Middle Ages were not inferior to the Renaissance and might have been less ignorant.

Consider, witch hunts began very late in the Middle Ages and continued to become more common and more deadly through the Renaissance and Reformation.

Take a look at art of the middle ages. Admittedly it is less realistic than the art of Michelangelo, but I can hardly buy the idea that it is really all inferior to the art of the Renaissance in any objective way.

The Church and civil authorities did not try to regulate science in the Middle Ages, but they did in the Renaissance.

We look at the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages through a lens that was strongly colored by the people of the Renaissance, and the effect of this is misunderstanding. Calling the period dark is only a part of this, but it is not helpful.

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The Dark Ages was never a synonym for the Mediaeval period, but used to be applied to the less-well known, unstable time following the end of the Roman Empire and its relatively high standards of living; and possibly ending with the time of the Saxons.

Answer 2

I think it is misleading to refer to the Middle Ages as Dark. The term Dark Ages was originally intended to convey the idea that a period in the Middle Ages produced very little writing, and so was historically obscure. The term is interpreted to imply that the time was on of brutishness, misery, and so on, which is really misleading.

We read that there were no schools in the Dark Ages. This is not true. There were schools that were opened in the 6th century by Visigoths and Anglo Saxons. In fact there was a school in Wales that was opened under the Roman Empire that was finally closed by Henry VIII, long after the Middle Ages ended. There are over seventy schools today that were opened during the Middle Ages, and additionally over sixty universities.

The Dark Ages were supposed to be a time of low culture. But the artwork that a survives from the period is sometimes quite amazing. The Anglo saxon shoulder clasp found at Sutton Hoo comes to mind. Anglo Saxon embroidery was sold as far off as Italy and was highly sought after.

The Middle Ages are thought of as a time of witch hunts. This is really interesting because people will say this and in the same breath talk about the Renaissance as saving the world from the Middle Ages. The thing that makes this so interesting is that the worst witch hunts happened in the Renaissance and the Reformation periods. The thing that was illegal in the Dark Age Carolingian Empire and the Kingdom of the Lombards was persecuting witches, because witchcraft was legally held to be a superstition.

People of the Dark Ages were supposed to be dirty and smelly. They had bath houses in villages. They believed that cleanliness was next to godliness. They believed that bad air carried disease, and so they prevented foul odors from building up. They were very clean.

I keep reading about serfs being slaves. Serfs were not entirely free, but they were not slaves. Their lack of freedom arose from the fact that they could not leave the manors on which they lived. But they could not be bought or sold, and they could not be made to move off the manor. They had their rights, and these included a right to a place to live, a right to fields to farm, and a right to be protected from robbers and wars. And, during any famine that happened, their lord was expected to feed them.