Others, however, have used the term to denote the relative scarcity of records regarding at least the early part of the Middle Ages.Īs the accomplishments of the era came to be better understood in the 19th and the 20th centuries, scholars began restricting the Dark Ages appellation to the Early Middle Ages ( c. The concept thus came to characterize the entire Middle Ages as a time of intellectual darkness in Europe between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance that became especially popular during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment. The phrase Dark Age(s) itself derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, originally applied by Caesar Baronius in 1602 when he referred to a tumultuous period in the 10th and 11th centuries. The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's "darkness" (ignorance and error) with earlier and later periods of 'light' (knowledge and understanding). The concept of a "Dark Age" as a historiographical periodization originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as "dark" compared to the "light" of classical antiquity. The Dark Ages is a term for the Early Middle Ages or occasionally the entire Middle Ages, in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire that characterises it as marked by economic, intellectual, and cultural decline. From Cycle of Famous Men and Women, Andrea di Bartolo di Bargilla, c. Petrarch (1304–1374), who conceived the idea of a European "Dark Age". For other uses, see Dark Ages (disambiguation). For Greece after the Late Bronze Age collapse, see Greek Dark Ages. This article is about the concept of a Dark Age in Western Europe after the Fall of the Western Roman Empire.
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