Interview – Dr David M. Perry on the “Dark Ages”
My guest today is Dr David M. Perry . David is a medieval historian and author of several books, including The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe and the forthcoming Oathbreakers, both co-authored with Matthew Gabriele. He has taught medieval history at Dominican University and is currently the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Minnesota. The Bright Ages sought to refute common misconceptions about the Middle Ages and counter the misconception that this period was a “dark age” of unrelieved brutality, ignorance, oppression and backwardness. So today David and I will be talking about the concept of the Medieval Period as “a dark age”, the origins of this idea and why it’s a poor way of understanding a complex 1000 year period of history.
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One thought on “Interview – Dr David M. Perry on the “Dark Ages””
I think one way in which the term “Dark Ages” is losing its original meaning and resonance is that we’re living in a much less classicising culture than we have been since the fifteenth century, and possibly ever in the history of the West. For example, the Times back in the 1880s had whole untranslated quotes in Latin and Ancient Greek which its readers were just expected to be able to read and understand. Whereas now that would be seen as absurdly elitist. The British Civil Service exams in the Victorian era required candidates to know all sorts of trivia about Latin literature and Roman history, whereas now it’s mostly generic intelligence testing and problem solving. Oxford, Cambridge and the Ivy League all required applicants to have studied Latin in secondary school until the 1960s. And as late as the 1960s it wasnt seen as too weird for US presidential candidates like Robert Kennedy or Eugene McCarthy to make learned allusions to Aeschylus and the Punic Wars. Basically, until a time within living memory Greece and Rome were seen as a civilisational gold standard and anyone who wanted to be somebody aspired to have at least a modicum of genuine classical knowledge.
But nowadays, I think that’s changed. The ancient Greeks and Romans are still studied in British primary schools but along with other ancient civilisations like the Egyptians, the Mayans, the Indus Valley etc. Lots of people go to the British museum to see the Parthenon marbles but they also go to see the Sutton Hoo helmet and the Franks Casket they don’t necessarily think that the former are inherently better in some way. Many people today prefer Beowulf to the Aeneid. To a lot of people all premodern history is exciting, violent, disgusting, superstitious, weird and different. So perhaps the Dark Ages at least in Petrarch’s original sense of the word may be losing cultural resonance.