The Great Myths 15: What about “the Dark Ages?”
The concept of “the Dark Ages” is central to several key elements in much anti-religious polemic. One of the primary myths most beloved by many anti-theists is the one whereby Christianity violently suppressed ancient Greco-Roman learning, destroyed an ancient intellectual culture based on pure reason and retarded a nascent scientific and technological revolution, thus plunging Europe into a one thousand year “dark age” which was only relieved by the glorious dawn of “the Renaissance”. But when this “Dark Age” supposedly was, what made it “dark” and what all this had to do with religion are usually left unsaid and – on critical examination – are usually hard to pin down. Like its twin concept – “the Renaissance” – this “Dark Age” is something everyone seems to know about, but few can actually delineate. This is because both the concept and the term have very serious historiographical problems.
The idea that religion ruled Europe in the Middle Ages and they were “the Dark Ages” as a result is so well-understood and generally accepted that it is regularly presented online in memes like the one above and variants like it. There is no attempt to detail when exactly this was, how precisely religion “ruled” or how this caused these ages to be “dark”. Like a lot of anti-theist historiography, this kind of meme is heavy on assumed understandings and light on details. Certainly some of the variants appear rather confused about the whole thing. Take this one from Twitter, for example:
This is, presumably, supposed to illustrate these “Dark Ages”. But the picture is a painting by the Flemish masters, Dieric Bouts and Hugo van der Goes, dated to c. 1468 and it depicts the story of the matyrdom of Saint Hippolytus of Rome, said to have been torn apart or dragged to death by horses. Using a fine work of late medieval Flemish art depicting the legend of a second century Christian who lived circa 170-235 AD and was, allegedly, executed by pagan Romans seems an odd choice as demonstration of these Christian “Dark Ages”.
A third example seems similarly muddle-headed:
At least in this case the people doing the killing are actually Christians. But so are the people being killed. This is a sixteenth century engraving from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563) depicting the execution of three Protestant women on Guernsey in the Channel Islands in 1556, during the Marian Persecutions. How this Early Modern example of Christians being horrible to each other illustrates these undefined “Dark Ages” is not clear, but this is apparently the sort of thing that went on in this period.
Confused and confusing memes aside, when queried about when exactly “the Dark Ages” were, most people who favour this term as a polemical tool use it as a synonym for the Middle Ages. Essentially, “the Dark Ages”, they claim, was the benighted and terrible period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and “the Renaissance”. So, roughly 500 to 1500 AD.
The Origin of the Term
The term “the Dark Ages” has its own history, and it begins with the fourteenth century poet Petrarch. Prior to his time, medieval scholars had something of an inferiority complex. Western culture had been looking back on earlier “golden ages” for centuries and as early as the late sixth century BC Hesiod laid out the idea that he lived in a debased and corrupted period and spoke of a χρύσεον γένος – an “Age of Gold”- as an ancient, idyllic era when “men lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief”. Christianity inherited this idea that things were in a long decline and coupled it with its own eschatology that talked of a period of debasement and chaos before the End Times and the Apocalypse.
With the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, these ideas were supplemented by the very real fact that early medieval western European lived surrounded by reminders of a past that was grander and greater than the present. Sometime in perhaps the eighth century an Anglo-Saxon monk wrote an elegy contemplating a Roman ruin:
“Eorðgrap hafað
waldend wyrhtan forweorone, geleorene,
heardgripe hrusan, oþ hund cnea
werþeoda gewitan. Oft þæs wag gebad
ræghar ond readfah rice æfter oþrum,
ofstonden under stormum; steap geap gedreas.”
(Earth-grip holds
the proud builders, departed, long lost,
and the hard grasp of the grave, until a hundred generations
of people have passed. Often this wall outlasted,
hoary with lichen, red-stained, withstanding the storm,
one reign after another; the high arch has now fallen.
The Ruin, ll. 6-11)
The same monk was probably also acutely aware of literary references to ancient works that he could never read: Greek and Roman works that were now lost in the collapse of the Empire. Even when western learning began to revive and many of those lost works came back to western Europe via Arabic and Hebrew translations from Sicily and Spain, western scholars still saw themselves as inferior to the ancients. In 1159 John of Salisbury wrote:
“Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.” (Metalogicon)
But by the early fourteenth century this inferior attitude began to change. After several centuries of the revival of Greek and Roman texts on logic, philosophy and proto-science, a new breed of scholar was turning their attention to ancient literary works. Petrarch was one of the earliest who not only devoted himself to Greek and Latin poetry and histories, but set out to imitate it in his own works and to reject the living Latin of his own day in an attempt at restoring the language to what he saw as its earlier purity.
For Petrarch and the Classical revivalist Humanists who followed him, he was not a dwarf compared to the ancient giants, he was their peer and equal. It was the lesser scholars of the period since the fall of Rome who were the midgets and that period between the end of the Empire and his own time that was an unfortunate interregnum. He saw himself as at the beginning of a new, better age that would parallel that of the ancients and dispel “the darkness”:
“[F]or 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 for ever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance.”(Africa, IX, 451-7)
Later Humanists continued this idea and the “dark” period in the middle – between the “radiance” of Greece and Rome and its new revival – came to be called first the media tempestas (” the middle times”) and later the medium aevum (“the middle ages”). “Medieval” was the English term derived from the latter and while it did not appear until the nineteenth century, the concepts of this period as “the Middle Ages” and its connections with ideas of it as a period of “darkness” were well and truly entrenched by then.
The terms “Middle Ages” and “Medieval” have cognates across Europe; the period is the Mittelalter to German speakers and the Moyen Âge to the French. But while these terms have all had some historiographical associations with “darkness”, the term “the Dark Ages” is uniquely English in its usage, if not its origin. The term was first used not as a way of denigrating the “middle times”, but actually in a work that went some way to defending them. Between 1588 and 1607 Cardinal Caesar Baronius published his multi-volume Church history, the Annales Ecclesiastici; which was in part a response to the Protestant version of history found in the Magdeburg Centuries (1559-74) produced by a group of Lutheran scholars.
Baronius found that the period between the end of the Carolingian dynasty in 888 and the church reforms of Pope Gregory VII was difficult to research because of a lack of source material:
“The new age which 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, dark.” ( Annales Ecclesiastici, Vol. X. Roma, p. 647)
This concept of a period that lacked written sources as a saeculum obscurum – “a Dark Age” – struck other historians as useful and it began to be applied by them first to the specific 160 years identified by Baronius and then to other periods for which source material was scanty. But it was in seventeenth century Protestant England that its English form began to be applied to the medieval period generally and to be given its pejorative overtones rather than its original technical meaning.
By the nineteenth century the terms “Dark Ages” and “Middle Ages” had become synonymous in English usage and the clearly Protestant, post-Enlightenment and decidedly Whiggish historiography of English language history writing in that period did not have a problem with its pejorative implications. Edward Gibbon, writing for a Protestant audience in the tradition of Voltaire and the French philosophes, had no qualms about scorning the “rubbish of the Dark Ages” and most popular history writing in this period usually maintained that scorn in both Britain and the U.S.
But the true academic study of the Medieval Period really only began in the twentieth century and by then the moralising, value judgements and biased sectarian polemic of eighteenth and nineteenth century historiography had been replaced by the far more objective, neutral and careful traditions that began with Leopold von Ranke and were developed by Marc Bloch and his successors. Value-laden terms like “the Dark Ages” began to fall from favour and modern historians now tend to avoid them, even though they linger in common parlance.
This was partly due to their obvious negative bias, but also due to the fact that, as twentieth century study of the Medieval Period proceeded, many of the assumptions about it were shown to be false. Far from being a period of technical stagnation, even the very early medieval period saw agrarian and technological innovation that transformed western and northern Europe economically and culturally. Rather than being a period of total Popish theocracy, the near constant tension and regular open conflict between Church and State meant the Church actually spent most of the period trying to extract itself from secular domination. It also became increasingly clear that the rise of universities, of communal republics and parliaments and of complex systems of law and governance meant that many institutions that are central to the modern world have their origins in the Medieval world rather than the more remote and rather alien Classical period.
And one of the key nineteenth century myths that the new medieval history specialists debunked was the idea that the Church suppressed or restricted inquiry into the natural and physical cosmos, stifling proto-science until the “yoke of the church” was thrown off in the “Renaissance”. Working on opposite sides of the Atlantic, Pierre Duhem (1861-1916) and Lynn Thorndike (1882-1965) both came to the conclusion that the idea of the Medieval Period as one of scientific stagnation until the “Renaissance” and the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth century was nonsense and that the revival of natural philosophy not only began as far back as the eleventh century, but the later medieval proto-scientific tradition laid the essential foundations of the later true revolution. This is now totally accepted by all modern historians of science.
So while all this is not well known to the average person today (and actively resisted as “revisionism” by biased ideologues), it’s all standard, accepted stuff for anyone with even the slightest undergraduate grasp of medieval history. As a result, the term “the Dark Ages” as applied to the whole Medieval Period is simply not used by modern historians at all. Where the term is applied at all, it is to a very specific period of British history: the 200 or so years from the withdrawal of Roman troops in the fifth century to the end of the north-west Germanic invasions and settlements in Britain in the late seventh century. This is a “dark age” in the technical sense of Baronius, because it is not well served by written sources (even though it continues to be increasingly illuminated by archaeology).
Defending the “Dark Ages”
As noted, there are some who do not like the fact that the term “the Dark Ages” is considered out of date and inaccurate and want to cling to it. This is usually because they rather like the old, moralistic divisions of western history into the “good” periods (the Classical world, the “Renaissance” and the Modern Era) and the “bad” one (the Medieval/”Dark Ages”). All this new-fangled nonsense about the Medieval Period not being so “dark” is dismissed as revisionist nonsense and, recently, as probably politically motivated and “woke”. This reactionary view is also often motivated by some very old and deeply seated sectarian and religious prejudices. The association of “the Dark Ages” with images of the repression and suppression of the medieval Catholic Church is an ingrained set of Protestant tropes that still pervades the Anglosphere. And this was inherited and intensified in the Enlightenment’s conception of history that forms a foundation for modernity. So there is a strong cultural current that runs against any dismissal of the term. Many people, especially ones who have never actually studied the period, just somehow know it was a “dark age” and dismiss anyone who claims otherwise.
Those who defend the term often engage in a form of “motte-and-bailey argument”. They begin by insisting that the Medieval Period definitely was a “dark age”, only relieved by the dawning of “the Renaissance” and finally dispelled by the Enlightenment. This runs into all the problems of exactly when and what this “the Renaissance” was – see “The Great Myths 13: The Renaissance Myth” for the tangle of historiographical problems involved there. But it is also hard to sustain given that we now have a far more extensive, detailed and nuanced understanding of the Middle Ages and modern historians since the early twentieth century have found most of the assumptions of their eighteenth and nineteenth century predecessors were simply wrong.
The revival of Classical learning previously attributed to “the Renaissance” of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is now well known to have begun much earlier; in the Twelfth Century Renaissance, and so right in the middle of the Middle Ages, not at its end. Many modern institutions and foundational concepts and practices turn out to have distinctly medieval origins, such as universities, parliaments, international banking and finance and the Common Law. Everything from double entry book keeping to modern musical notation and even commonplace items like chimneys and buttons are all medieval in origin.
As already mentioned, far from being a period of scientific stagnation or even the suppression of natural philosophy, the medieval period saw a remarkable revival of rational inquiry into the natural world, stimulated by the rediscovery of Greek works lost in the fall of the Western Roman Empire and by the discovery of Arabic works that expanded these subjects. Not only did the medieval period see work in a range of fields from optics to physics by some remarkable scholars, but modern historians of science now argue that the later development of modern science in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries had essential medieval foundations. As Edward Grant details in his The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge: 1996), the proto-scientific foundational work of medieval scholars was not just important but fundamental to the development of the full scientific method and its attendant institutions and norms. Modern science would not have developed in the west without the work of medieval natural philosophers like Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, John Peckham, Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton, Richard of Wallingford, Nicholas Oresme, Jean Buridan and Nicholas of Cusa. In recent years this better understanding of the history of science has been made more accessible to the non-specialist through excellent popularisations like James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (Icon: 2009) and Seb Falk’s The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science (Norton: 2020).
Similarly, the idea that the Medieval Period was technologically stagnant has also been completely revised. Even the nineteenth century polemicists grudgingly granted the Middle Ages the technical innovations of gothic architecture, which saw the spires of cathedrals stand as the tallest buildings in the world until, remarkably, the 1890s (if we do not count the Pyramids of Giza). But the Middle Ages also saw the invention or development of technologies such as blast furnaces, mechanical clocks, astronomical clocks, windmills, eye glasses, gantry cranes, rolling mills, stern rudders, horizontal looms, corned gunpowder, compound curved plate armour and magnets. Medieval technicians loved mechanical solutions to problems, applying them to everything from turning spits to roast meat to making clockwork automata to entertain dinner guests. Joseph and Frances Gies, Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages (Harper, 1994) and Jean Gimpel’s The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (Barnes and Noble: 1976) both detail how technically inventive the Middle Ages actually were.
Confronted with evidence like this and much more besides, those who want to defend the “Dark Ages” conception abandon the “bailey” part of their position and retreat to their “motte” – they concede that not all of the Middle Ages were “dark”, but note most of these examples come from the Later Middle Ages. So they redraw the boundaries of these “Dark Ages” as referring not to the Middle Ages as a whole, but to the Early Medieval Period. The centuries following the fall of Rome, they assure us, are the actual “Dark Ages” where everything was terrible, backward and in decline. Here they are on slightly firmer ground, but several major historiographical problems remain.
Decline and Fall and/or Transformation
The collapse of the Western Roman Empire has been the subject of centuries of debate, not only as to its causes but also its nature. For a very long time it was seen in fairly simple terms: the Empire was rotten within and so overcome from without by waves of barbarian invaders. What followed was a catastrophic collapse of civilisation, with the whole of western Europe regressing to primitive barbarism among the fallen ruins of the glory that was Rome.
In the twentieth century this picture underwent substantial revision. Historians emphasised not just what was lost, but also what survived. Emphasis was placed not only on sharp breaks with the Roman past in the Early Medieval world, but on less obvious but still significant continuities. By the end of the century there was a strong emphasis on the end of the Western Empire not as a story of chaos and collapse but of transition and transformation. By 1995 Princeton’s Peter Brown published his The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000 (Wiley-Blackwell: 1995, 2013), which was considered a masterwork of historical analysis and synthesis spanning Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. The date parameters of Brown’s study mean he did not abide by the older norms that saw a hard break at the end of the Western Empire. His book traces the continuities and transformations across a period that begins with the Roman Empire at its height and ends halfway through the Medieval Period. In many respects Brown’s book exemplifies the historiographical trend that is referred to as the Continuity Thesis.
But academic trends usually invite reaction, rejection and backlash. In 2005 archaeologist and historian Bryan Ward-Perkins produced a work that took aim at this image of continuity and argued for a re-examination of the older chaos and catastrophe model. In The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford: 2005). Ward-Perkins makes a strong argument against the Continuity Thesis, which he sees more informed by post-War European politics than solid evidence. Drawing on both archaeological data and textual sources, he argues that the material decline and collapse of things like long distance trade and major public infrastructure meant the end of Rome genuinely was a catastrophic fall. He states that if we compare a second century Roman Briton living in villa with hypocaust heating under its mosaic floor and drinking wine imported from the Rhine in amphorae made in Spain, he is a world away from his sixth century descendant who lives in a smoky thatched hall and drinks ale from a primitive locally made cup. Ward-Perkins and, to an extent, Germanicist Peter Heather (see The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History, Pan: 2006) led a counter argument for a Catastrophist Thesis.
Unsurprisingly, those who want to preserve the idea of “the Dark Ages” – at least for the earlier part of the Middle Ages – hold up the Catastrophists as wholly correct. In the decades since Ward-Perkins’ book was published, however, historians have (as they often do) come to a more nuanced consensus. Whether the Fall of Rome was mainly a catastrophe or mostly a continuity, most would argue today, depends on when, where and what you are talking about.
As some of Ward-Perkins’ critics noted at the time, many of his examples come from the fringes of the Empire, where Roman civilisation was an imported business mostly propped up by the infrastructure and economics of the military and the taxation systems. As Western Roman politics consumed itself with civil wars and usurpers in the fifth century, people on the edges of the system were forced to (and, seemingly, also chose to) become more self-reliant and local in their thinking and action. So while there are good examples of chaos from, say, Roman Britian or western Spain, there are localised continuities and transformations there too. Closer to the centre we find more transformation and continuity, punctuated by periods of chaos and collapse. So, it depends.
It also depends on what we choose to focus on and value. The original, traditional Catastrophist Thesis of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was framed by men who saw strong monarchical rule, centralised authority, an empire that traded the Pax Romana for riches and tribute, a centralised taxation system, a large and expensive standing army, large public works of great extravagance, and an economy with a few very rich people at the top and masses of poor or unfree people at the base as normal, proper and good. Therefore, for them, the breakdown and collapse of all these things was, therefore, automatically bad. These were the things, they believed, that made civilisation civilised. Their fall was, therefore, automatically a terrible tragedy.
Many people today would question most if not all of these assumptions, at least to some extent. If we do value those things and concentrate on them, the Catastrophists and the “Dark Ages” defenders who rely on them may seem to have a point. But what if we focus on other things? A comparison between a third century Gallo-Roman peasant and his seventh century Merovingian descendant that concentrates on things other than mosaics, roofing materials and whether or not there was an amphitheatre in the nearest city but, rather, notes other differences may arrive at a different view. The third century Gaul was paying substantial taxes – up to a third of his yearly income – and this was brutally enforced by officials who often needed to be placated with gifts and bribes. And while these taxes substantially went to paying the Roman Army, that army was in this period regularly at war with itself, while foreigners were taking advantage of this by raiding over the frontiers deep into Roman territory. Our Gallo-Roman was not getting much of a return on his tax. His Merovingian descendant, on the other hand, paid no taxes to anyone. It would be some time before the bureaucracy or infrastructure for that kind of thing would develop again in what was becoming France. Frankish nobles and their neighbours occasionally fought small scale wars, but it would be rare for our peasant to be affected by those. His home may have been thatched rather than tiled, but he appears by many measures to be better off than his ancestor. There is even some evidence that average height increased in the Early Medieval Period, before declining in later centuries (see Richard H. Steckel, “New Light on the ‘Dark Ages’: The Remarkably Tall Stature of Northern European Men during the Medieval Era”, Social Science History, Vol. 28, No. 2, 2004, pp. 211-229).
So this was a “Dark Age” for who, exactly? Or what are we choosing to highlight when we make this assessment? What we decide regarding what was “dark” or “light” depends on what we choose to assign value or where we choose to focus.
And this is the problem with this whole terminology. It is value-laden and based on selective focus and judgement. Someone who values proto-science over theology will regard the Early Medieval Period as a barren wasteland. But those who regard highly abstract and intricately-patterned art will see it as a period of remarkable examples of beauty and innovation. It all depends on where you look and how you focus.
This is why value-judgement based terms like “the Dark Ages” are not useful. Even if we leave aside the heavy historiographical baggage and associations that weigh down the term, it is hardly neutral terminology. This is why neutral terms like “the Early Middle Ages” are better and so are generally more accepted by current historians. This is not them being revisionist, apologetic or “woke”. It is simply them doing their job with objectivity.
Those who defend the concept of the “Dark Ages” are usually not very interested in objectivity. In fact, many of them have definite agendas; mostly very modern and often highly ideological if not political. Certainly those who like “the Dark Ages” because it gives them a stick with which to beat religion in general and Christianity in particular do so because of deeply unobjective and highly emotional motivations. Even if these people retreat to the “motte” and argue for a highly Catastrophist view of the Early Middle Ages, they are stuck with another problem. If this regression was somehow due to Christianity, they need to explain why the period in which the Church was relatively weak was the one which saw all this decline and disintegration. Whereas the period where the power, wealth and influence of the Church was at its height – the High Middle Ages – was the one that saw an economic boom, European expansion, technical innovation and the foundations of modern science. The anti-Christian polemicists are stuck with a situation that is the precise opposite of what their prejudices predict.
No historiography occurs in a vacuum and these topics and the assumptions and terminology around them will always be influenced by and reflect the wider culture. But rational people are careful to try to analyse history with objectivity, not bend it to use as a blunt ideological tool or weapon. The “Dark Ages” has long been used as both. Which is an excellent reason to abandon the concept.
Further Reading
Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000 (Wiley-Blackwell: 1995, 2013) – Note the detailed “Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Revised Edition” (2013), particularly Brown’s response to Ward-Perkins (pp. xxx-xxxii)
Stephen C. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1998)
Seb Falk, The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science (Norton: 2020)
Joseph and Frances Gies, Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages (Harper, 1994)
Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (Barnes and Noble: 1976)
Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge: 1996)
James Hannam, God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (Icon: 2009)
Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History, (Pan: 2006)
Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford: 2005)
60 thoughts on “The Great Myths 15: What about “the Dark Ages?””
The Dark Ages concept has a Protestant ( anti-Catholic) version which marks the end of the period not with the Renaissance but with Luther.
Re those tall Europeans, I have seen a detailed breakdown of the medieval and pre -medieval diets very favorable to the former.Maybe in Gimpel.
Finally there is the impact of the medieval collapse of slavery on the development of labour- saving devices like windmills, the horse collar, topside waterwheels.
Yes. Many who decry serfdom and pity the serfs, but never spare a thought about the slaves in the Roman empire…. and a lot of serfs were former slaves who now had a home, a family, and a field that they could call their own.
Also the idea of the Classical world being ruled by reason never takes notice of such things as the office of the augur, a Roman public official, who was paid to look at the entrails of birds and tell the future that way.
Can I add two books to your reading list:
Stephen C. McCluskey, “Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe”, CUP, 1998
and
John W. Farrell, “The Clock and the Camshaft: And Other Medieval Inventions We Still Can’t Live Without”, Prometheus Books, 2020
Thanks. I’ve added McCluskey. But I found Farrell’s book to be a bit ordinary. I think Gies and and Gies and Gimpel’s books do the job better.
I should have noted that one of McCluskey’s central themes is that the partial survival of Greek astronomy during the general decline of learning in the Early Medieval Period took place because of the targeted conservation and copying of the texts in the libraries of the Christian cloisters and monasteries. Far from destroying knowledge the Christian monks conserved it.
The Farrell is a good, solid, historically accurate, popular presentation of the material.
A nice review of later reconsiderations of the Early Medieval period. For some reason you ignore Marc Bloch’s Feudalism, perhaps counter productive to your thesis. Or perhaps Bloch himself is counter productive to the Byzantine world of 21st century Academe.
Surely the eager scholar of today, whose academic survival is as tenuous a a sub Roman’s survival in fifth century Britain, will acknowledge that the world of 8h century Francia was rather different from 3rd century Francia or the same area in the 12th century.
So the question is, certainly for publication demands, what to call it, and how to account for the differences between these periods.
Any presentation, however brief, needs to look hard at economic issues, especially trade, and land use issues, particularly the later period’s reclamation of the wilderness.
I mentioned Bloch. I didn’t “ignore” his work on “fedualism”, I just didn’t mention it. Which is not the same thing. I have no idea how it would be “counterproductive” to my “thesis”, or how he would be “counter productive to the Byzantine world of 21st century Academe”. I completely fail to see his relevance here. His work is pretty dated and thinking on “feudalism” has changed dramatically since his time, with serious doubts about whether such a thing even existed.
Of course they do. What’s that got to do with anything I said?
What to call … what? And you think modern historians aren’t accounting for those differences? What has this got to do with ther term/concept “the Dark Ages”?
Ah yes, the classic “tHeY hAvE tO tOe ThE LiNe If ThEy WaNt To GeT pUbLiShEd!” argument beloved of anti-intellectual types everywhere.
an inverse to this non-argument is “well of course a *medievalist* would say they didn’t all live in poop and were terrified da Church would execute them for learning to read, historians are just besotted with their chosen topics so there’s no need to listen to those nerds”
It seems like the Dark Age myth often implies Medieval Europeans weren’t just ignorant, but quite dumb. Imagine one of these guys time warping back to the Middle Ages and trying to explain something like thermodynamics or how a semiconductor works to Medieval intellectuals -most wouldn’t have a clue where to begin.
This physics meme says it all:
https://www.reddit.com/r/physicsmemes/comments/1em8pws/this_old_meme_got_me_thinking_how_much_of_an/
They are wondering how a brilliant 21st Century physicist could explain modern science to Medieval people without getting “Giordano Bruno’ed.” Considering I encountered this page on a completely unrelated search, the myth of Medieval hostility to science seems quite pervasive.
In fact Bruno lived post-Renaissance yet they are associating the Bruno affair with the “Middle Ages.” This speaks to the argument made in the “Renaissance Myth” part of this blog -that people pick and choose what they want to be Medieval or Renaissance, and it’s almost always based on a value judgement.
The other problem with the “getting Brunoed” idea is that Bruno was not a scientist and was not executed for presenting any “incredible scientific knowledge”. There is one lonely comment to that effect on that thread which has been totally ignored and is right at the bottom.
Yes and that one lonely comment is me. So, other than that, there was no one on that thread who was aware of this.
Those memes shared at the beginning reminded me of a quote attributed to Ruth Hermence Green: “There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages.”
When I first saw that quote, my first thought was that the second sentence should rather read “It was known as the vast majority of human history.” At least the memes you shared bothered to specify which “religion.”
Also, great observation on the motte and bailey of defences of the “dark ages” construct. Yes, there was a time when infrastructure collapsed following the decline of a united Western Roman Empire; no, that does not mean the Church made science illegal and burned educated women for 1,000 years.
“da Church made it punishable by death to learn to read!”
the complete lack of any primary sources to that effect is, of course, easily reinterpreted as further proof
There is an increasing amount of good scholarly work being done on early medieval science too. It’s not as obviously connected to the modern scientific tradition as later medieval science, and much more directly inspired by Christianity (e.g. development of computus for the calculation of Easter, which draws in observations of the moon and wider astronomy), but it’s still by definition “science”.
There’s a good summary here: https://merovingianworld.com/2019/08/08/the-dark-ages-didnt-suppress-science/ and James Palmer has some other excellent posts on these topics as well.
“a very specific period of British history: the 200 or so years from the withdrawal of Roman troops in the fifth century to the end of the north-west Germanic invasions and settlements in Britain in the late seventh century.”
That’s pretty much how it was presented to us at school. It was never applied to the continent. The start was when the legions left (or soon after): pretty suddenly, there are next to no written sources to illuminate what had been going on. Hence “Dark”.
The end was vaguer. Certainly before 1066. Maybe when Alfred of Wessex got himself taught to read and encouraged schools: nope, that too is a bit late. If he valued literacy then there must have been some about.
Maybe you could argue for the Dark Ages dwindling away between Bede’s book (731) and the Synod of Whitby (664).
Of religious affairs on the continent our lessons were mainly confined to gripping yarns about Catholics vs Arians. That’s probably why I still can’t bring myself to abbreviate Roman Catholic to Catholic.
” the term “the Dark Ages” is uniquely English in its usage, if not its origin.”
While I don’t doubt its English origin Dutch knows the expression “Donkere Middeleeuwen”, German “Dunkle Jahrhunderte”. French has even two: “Age Sombre” and “Siecles Obscurs.
Dark Age is not properly defined. The only objective definition I can think of is “Intermediate period without written sources”. Examples: Greece between approximately 1000 and 600 BCE, England between 400 and 550 CE and The Netherlands from 350 CE on.
Obviously with such a definition Dark Age is not synonymous with Middle Ages at all.
Another very informative review, thank you. About the term Dark Ages remaining in use today, I think Humanists UK must qualify as one of the “biased ideologues” who still cling to it. The term features prominently in their ‘timeline’ and dubious ‘3000 years’ of humanist history…
https://humanists.uk/humanism/the-humanist-tradition/renaissance/
https://heritage.humanists.uk/timeline/
https://humanists.uk/events/3000-years/
Seems like they’re also confused about the term ‘humanist’. The “secular humanism” of Greco-Roman culture and the “secular humanism” of modern atheists aren’t the same thing, and so there is no 3000 year history. They are trying to connect their philosophy to a tradition with ancient origins, and the result is very whiggish.
Even Wikipedia gets this right on their ‘Renaissance humanism’ article:
“During the Renaissance period most humanists were Christians, so their concern was to “purify and renew Christianity”, not to do away with it.”
The sharp distinction between religion and humanism is quite a recent thing, and is mainly a rejection of the theistic claim that religion is necessary for morality.
“Christianity inherited this idea that things were in a long decline and coupled it with its own eschatology that talked of a period of debasement and chaos before the End Times and the Apocalypse.”
One of the first proponents of historical optimism I have come across is Paulus Orosius:
“I started to work and at first became confused, for as I repeatedly turned over these matters in my mind the disasters of my own times seemed to have boiled over and exceeded all usual limits. But now I have discovered that the days of the past were not only as oppressive as those of the present but that they were the more terribly wretched the further they were removed from the consolation of true religion.”
– Histories Against the Pagans
A useful and nuanced summary
You have not addressed Scott Alexander’s objection: How likely is it that a scientifically inclined man who is ready to proclaim radical new ideas will never run afoul of theological orthodoxies?
Has Christianity championed freedom of inquiry, or not rather fought against it? Ceaseless efforts to rid itself of heretics, emphasis on authority, suspicion of reason and embrace of censorship do not advance science. In the case of Roman Catholics (the denomination I am most familiar with) one might say it took until Vatican II to accommodate the modern world.
Who the hell is Scott Alexander?
Okay, whoever the hell Scott Alexander is, they clearly know nothing about the history of medieval thought. The answer to his question is “pretty much never”. This is evidenced by the fact that there are literally zero examples of anyone in the Middle Ages getting into theological trouble for anything we would consider “scientific”. That’s because of the Two Book Doctrine, which saw the world as explained by “the Book of Nature” and “the Book of God”. The latter consisted of the Bible, Patristic writings and works of theology. The former consisted of observation and reason based natural philosophy. The doctrine was that both “books” describe the same cosmos in different ways. Therefore if one seems to contradict the other, we are simply interpreting it wrongly. So we either need to reexamine the scientific evidence or we need to reinterpret or understand the religious idea. This is why there are no examples of clashes between the two in the period.
It’s done both. Though it’s been rather more concerned about freedom of theological inquiry than scientific thought.
Yet science arose in a Christian context and nowhere else. So you have yourself a historical problem with your assertion above. Again, Christian restrictions on thought focused almost entirely on religious matters. You’re parroting the hoary old Conflict Thesis, which has been rejected by historians of science for about a century. Please bring yourself up to date.
“Yet science arose in a Christian context and nowhere else.”
Archimedes would like a word.
Archimedes, like everyone prior to the sixteenth century, was a natural philosopher. He did not apply the full scientific method and was not doing true science. He did mainly mathematics and some proto-scientific tinkering.
I’m not sure that I buy that, but I’m also not sure I don’t. Might be a good topic for a future essay.
You think the modern scientific method existed in third century Sicily and was used by Archimedes? It didn’t and it wasn’t.
“science arose in a Christian context and nowhere else”?
Yes. In the sixteenth century. No, what the Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Medievals did was not modern style science.
Nor was what anyone was doing in the 16th century! Consider Kepler, with his astrology, use of religious arguments, and attempts to fit the planetary orbits into the Platonic solids. Or, I’d say, until well into the 19th. Consider the attempts to reconcile geology and Genesis by the likes of William Buckland and Adam Sedgwick – both churchmen-scientists, the latter a good example of a transitional figure, who admirably changed his mind on Noah’s flood in the face of evidence, but continued to the end of his life (1873) to reject evolution, complaining of “The Origin of Species” that “It repudiates all reasoning from final causes; and seems to shut the door on any view (however feeble) of the God of Nature as manifested in His works”.
Except Kepler didn’t just do astrology. He also applied the new methodologies based on quantification, measurement and repeatability to discover real world physical laws. He was definitely inspired by some non-scientific ideas, but he still used science in the modern sense. No one in the ancient world did, at least not in any consistent and systematic way. Similarly, some nineteenth century vicars did try to reconcile geology with Genesis. But they had actual geology to work with thanks to the development of the Scientific Method in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Alfred W. Crosby’s The Measure of Reality: Quantification in Western Europe, 1250–1600 (Cambridge, 1998) details this transformation from natural philosophy to modern science.
Eratosthenes does seem
to be using a scientific method in that the size differential of the shadows alone would imply roundness, this testing a null hypothesis. You seem hell bent on denying that anyone ever used “science” as you narrowly define it apart from Christians.
Again, Eratosthenes wasn’t proving “roundness”. He took that as a given. Have you actually read the sources on what he was doing and how?
I don’t ccare if they were Christians or Shintoists. The fact remains that the full scientific method did not develop until the sixteenth to seventeenth centurires. Earlier natrual philosophers used some of the elements that later came to make up the scientific method – such as geometry – but they were not doing modern style science.
Regardless of where we delineate ‘modern’ or ‘true’ science from ‘pre-modern sciencey-stuff’, we can surely agree that there was a revolution of some kind in 16th/17th century Europe, unless one wishes to argue that the term ‘Scientific Revolution’ refers to nothing of import. And 16th/17th century Europe was certainly a Christian context. This is a problem for those who think of Christianity’s influence on science as purely baleful, whatever definitions they wish to employ.
Exactly.
If Christians invented and perfected the scientific method, how did Eratosthenes know to devise an experiment to prove the earth’s roundness?
Eratosthenes didn’t “prove the earth’s roundness”. He assumed that. He made a calculation of its circumference which may have been fairly accurate, depending on how we interpret the sources regarding what “stadion” he was using as his unit of measurement. And he didn’t do any “experiment”. He simply accepted certain measurements and information and applied some geometry. Lots of pop history sites and videos, based largely on Carl Sagan’s 1980 TV series Cosmos, tell an exciting story of Eratosthenes measuring the distance between Alexandria and Syene and using sticks and experiment to come up with his calculations. None of the sources say anything like this. He did the whole think via basic geometry. And no, that isn’t using the modern scientific method, sorry. Just plain old reasoning and some mathematics.
From what I’ve read (eg Duane Roller’s excellent Eratosthenes’ Geography), Eratosthenes relied on data about shadows being cast by sundial and gnomon in different locations, and distance data provided by the surveyors of King Ptolemaios, ie no sticks involved and no personally hiring a man to pace it out!
I guess we will agree to disagree on your narrow definition of “modern” science. It’s still science. I have read The Method of Eratosthenes by Cleomedes albeit as a translation. To your point about Sagan and sticks, the translation states “gnomons of horology” which is essentially the same thing.
Again, applying reason and geometry is not using the scientific method.
Eratosthenes took some hearsay information and applied a geometric calculation to it. We hear about it a lot because (depending on how we interpret the units of measurement he may have used) he was close to being right. We don’t hear much about the other ancient calculations of the size of the earth which were wildly wrong.
And because the ancients didn’t have the scientific method, they couldn’t work out if Eratosthenes was right or Ptolemy was. Or if they were both wrong. Eratosthenes didn’t do his own measurements, didn’t impose controls to make sure those measurements were accurate and didn’t test alternative hypotheses. He didn’t publish his findings in a document that was checked by others with sufficient learning and understanding to make sure his methodology was sound and he wasn’t fixing any measurements or results. There was no network of accredited institutions which formed an international community of qualfied experts who then applied sceptical, critical scrutiny to his findings to stress test them. So there was no way to compare his findings to anyone else’s in a valid and objective manner or to adjust and refine his findings or build on them to create better maps or natigational technology.
THAT is modern science. Not applying what is now high school geometry to some rumoured claims.
At Nunya beeswax:
Modern science is applying the scientific method. Eratosthenes didn’t live in an age with the institution of academia, communications nor even paper to make the scientific method possible.
Thinking about this further, I checked my old (1980s) Larousse Encyclopedia of Ancient & Medieval History, and it’s interesting to note that there’s no mention of the Dark Ages at all. There are dark times (barbarian invasions, wars etc), but what also comes across is an Age of immense change, the emergence of new kingdoms (and eventually nations and countries), technical innovations (“from the rudder to the compass, from the windmill to accountancy…”) and of course the rise and triumph of Christianity.
Also, your comment about the Humanists and media tempestas reminds me of something CS Lewis wrote, which is that the very idea of the ‘medieval’ is a humanistic invention. Moreover, the implication “that a thousand years of theology, metaphysics, jurisprudence, courtesy, poetry, and architecture are to be regarded as a mere gap, or chasm, or entre-acte” is he says, “a preposterous conception”. Thank again for a thought-provoking article.
I also find it preposterous to speak of “the Middle Ages” as a single period of history. A thousand years is no short time to creatures who are lucky to live to 100 (and who regard a 40 year old encyclopedia as “old”). Imagine 500 years from now they invent a name to describe the 11th to the 21st Century, the period before Mars was colonized or humanity acquired an AI-induced superintelligence. This could only work if you use the present as a yardstick for the past, rather than study the past on its own terms.
Just for fun I googled maps of Europe from the Early to Late Middle Ages, and as you’d expect the geopolitical changes from the 6th Century to 11th were more dramatic than from the 16th Century to the present. One way around this has been the invention of terminology like “Early Middle Ages” and “High Middle Ages” etc, but at some point the very idea of a “Middle Age” will have to be abandoned altogether.
And, not to open a political can of worms, but I also find it problematic to associate record-keeping with enlightenment. I doubt future historians will regard this era of American politics as a particularly sophisticated age, even though they’ll have a surplus of source material and data to mine through. I accept that the records “went dark” at some point after the collapse of the Western Empire, but what this tells us about how enlightened/intelligent/sophisticated European “Dark Age” societies were is another question. If we turn to science, they say that the brains of modern humans are ~13% smaller than those of homo sapiens living 100,000 years ago, and that human intelligence peaked several thousand years ago and has been on a slow decline ever since (with many ups and downs over shorter intervals). In the past 100 years they observed increases in average (Western) IQs from the 1920s to 1990s, but that trend reversed over the last 30 years. So, human intelligence has been declining since the 1990s, despite the explosion in information technologies.
And if we want to talk about how superstitious and irrational “modern” people are? Refer to the Q Anon cult, the Christian Zionists who think the wars in the Middle East are signs of the End Times, and certain American politicians blurting on live TV about migrants eating people’s pets.
The thing I find funny about the first of those memes is the implication that religion didn’t run the world prior to and after “the Dark Ages”. Because the Roman Empire, where the emperor was a priest, augurs were part of the government structure and temples were paid for by the elite and the states of Early Modern Europe where the church was a department of the government were the epitome of separation of church and state.
Maybe I’m wrong, but surely the people who make these memes know the Romans weren’t modern sceptics. Or can they just not bring themselves to hate Roman religion because it’s not around anymore?
That’s the difficulty in arguments about whether Religion (conceived of as some sort of monolithic entity, which is merely the first fallacy of the argument) has done on balance more harm or good. Religion of some kind has been deeply embedded in every human society, often in ways that were inseparable from the rest of society, which means everything that happened, good or bad, had the local religion mixed up in it. At a general level, at least, the question is unanswerable.
Steve Watson,
A point well-made. Belief-systems are essentially an outgrowth of human societies and express their way of understanding their world, both what we’d call the ‘physical’ world and the person’s ‘world in the more general sense – so though one family member might be a farmer, another a politician or a baker and another a priest, ‘the church’ wasn’t perceived as it is today and by-and-large attitudes were much the same throughout earlier medieval Europe. What we see happen in western Europe is a long-drawn-out struggle between religious (elected) authority and the secular/inherited authority over whose views should be the final ones when a person has to make certain decisions – is it right to obey a ‘wicked’ edict? Is it right to believe an oath to support a king overrides obligations owed to God’s representative on earth? (yes, I’m simplifying). In Europe, that centuries’ long competition ended with the secular side, in some states, successfully asserting the right to choose what religious views would be held by their own subjects and that in turn led to the breaking up of what had been a region united by common belief. However, that idea of a king choosing what religious ideas would or wouldn’t be acceptable in his kingdom was far from a new phenomenon – and was the way that Christianity had managed to achieve such dominance within the Mediterranean and in Europe in the first place.
> However, that idea of a king choosing what religious ideas would or wouldn’t be acceptable in his kingdom was far from a new phenomenon – and was the way that Christianity had managed to achieve such dominance within the Mediterranean and in Europe in the first place
That’s not true at all. Kings usually were powerless to the church& its grip on society and sometimes even suffered when trying to exert power over them. The pope & the wider church could excommunicate feudal leaders, and that would allow their rivals a casus belli to go to war with them. Clearly you’re not even aware of the Thomas A’Beckett incident let alone understand how the medieval world worked,
Obviously a King becoming Christian could assist in the spread of Christianity and the conversion from pagan (and sometimes Islamic) beliefs. But the king had no power within the church. The institution of feudal kingdom and clergy were parallel power based and structures that governed different facets of medieval European and middle eastern societies.
“But the king had no power within the church.”
Except those French and Spanish kings who appointed bishops.
Got any examples there “dearieme”?
Something like three centuries’ worth for both, if you’ll settle for Wokeypedia. No doubt Britannica will teach you much the same thing. I don’t suppose there are many scholarly papers nowadays on what must surely be treated as certain knowledge.
I’m astonished that anyone interested in history doesn’t know this.
Okay dearieme noted that you couldn’t name any examples.
And also because, Medieval European kings did not have absolute power anyway. The most powerful kings at the time were the ones who had popular support, and it was not always clear that a king had more power than a count or an earl -nobility could and often did challenge the authority of kings (which is one of the reasons why the the very existence of Medieval “feudalism” has been called into question). Much of what we call “kingships” in the Middle Ages were ceremonial titles anyway, not a license to dictate what’s what to everyone.
I don’t know where people got this idea of Medieval kings as absolute dictators doing the Church’s business (movies?), but it’s laughably inaccurate. Neither the Church nor the political entities of Medieval Europe had a sophisticated bureaucracy or a rigid and impenetrable hierarchy, and certainly no ability to control what people believed (a king’s own understanding of Christianity would’ve been unsophisticated). This was also an age before any clear division existed between pseudo-sciences (like astrology) and sciences (like astronomy), and so it’s not clear why anyone would think scientific ideas would be particularly unsettling. Theology, astrology and what we would call an early form of science were often blended together (see “computus” for example).
@Jonathan:
Yes people assume that medieval kingdoms and fiefdoms were like the nation states of today and that the king and his court were like modern governments.
Anyway this is all a tangent.
I’ve read Crosby’s excellent book mentioned above by Tim O’Neill. My point is, there was no single point or even century when “modern science” emerged. 16th, 17th, even 19th century science lacked many of the methodological, cultural and institutional features of science now, while both ancient (e.g Claudius Ptolemy) and Arabic (e.g. Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham (“Alhazen”) – who was cited by Kepler, Galileo, Huygens and Newton) proto-science laid foundations without which the changes in conceptions of time and space which Crosby dates to 1250-1350, and which in turn led to Copernicus, Kepler, Newton… would have been unlikely to occur.
When exactly we can say we get full scientific method is, of course, debateable. But it’s not until the sixteenth to seventeenth century that it takes a form that modern scientists would recognise and gives us regular results that modern science still uses and relies on. The point I made remains – no one before this was doing modern style science. Science as we know it DID arise in a Christian context, so the claim I was addressing – that it was hampered by Christianity’s “ceaseless efforts to rid itself of heretics, emphasis on authority, suspicion of reason and embrace of censorship” – is clearly wrong.
Can we at least agree that your statement above – “Yet science arose in a Christian context and nowhere else” – is too strong? Science has been going on for millennia, as our distant forefathers applied themselves to understanding the natural world. What you have been insisting on in later comments in this thread is that the *modern scientific method* arose in 16th-17th century Europe, which is entirely true but not the same as science arising at that time. The people 10,000 years ago who first began figuring out agriculture were absolutely doing science – botany, specifically. They weren’t using the modern scientific method because, as you correctly note, that was developed much later. But they were running annual experiments in plant cultivation with an aim towards reliable food production, and they revised their theories and practices based upon the results of these experiments. Ergo, science.
Since I was referring to modern science, no. It’s not “too strong”, it’s comepletely accurate.
Since that much broader (and actually rather too broad) definition is not what I was talking about, it’s not relevant to what I said.
I agree with your last sentence.
I’m a complete layman when it comes to history (my day job is a janitor) but I love your work, because I have an endless fascination with both medieval and Christian/Church history. Unfortunately, these areas of study are often intertwined with political agendas or personal vendetta.
I grew up evangelical and always latched onto the Bible, it’s stories, and loved reading all the different interpretations; but disliked the sort of emotional proselytizing that section of faith wanted from me. (I’m mainline United Methodist now) And like most kids, I enjoyed the imagery of knights and castles and learning about the facts vs fiction.
So even though I’m not your target demographic, I want to thank you for your work and for sharing your knowledge. True histories are a hundred times more fascinating than being preached at or some stranger on the internet making a “gotcha” meme.