The "Dark Ages"

This is my (Christine's) first week back at NSA, and it's my last year! Joel doesn't start until next week, but he has to put up with me spending every night this week doing homework, since I already have a good deal to accomplish. But I thought I'd take a break and blog about something interesting that we discussed in Mr. Grieser's senior traditio class today.

One of the instigators of the Renaissance in the fourteenth century was a poet named Petrarch. As a poet, one who deals with words, his primary concern was preserving and improving language. Since Petrarch spoke Latin, he had to find a reliable source to learn from. And so who does he turn to to polish his Latin skills? The greatest orator of the Roman world, Cicero. Petrarch found himself constantly referring to the ancient Romans for examples of eloquent Latin with a rhetorical flare. Consequently he regarded the Latin language after the fall of Rome as barbaric and uncultured. This, of course, inspired his linguistic reform, and it also brought about an important three-part division of history in Petrarch's mind. The ancient Greeks and Romans lived in glorious Antiquity as free people (Rome was the great Republic and the Greeks had their city-states) who were able to pursue and cultivate the arts. But after Rome fell the arts witnessed a steady decline, and so Petrarch coined the time from Augustine up to the 14th century "The Dark Ages". Now Petrarch saw a third era of history dawning, a Renaissance, an Enlightenment.

Other people took hold of this name and ran with it. Protestants liked the term dark ages because this was the time of tyrannical Papal rule. They criticized the papacy and blamed it for the doctrinal errors that surfaced during the "Dark Ages." Voltaire and other Enlightenment thinkers liked to blame the Dark Ages on the Christians and their tyrannical and progress-stunting religion.

In reality, this is a very unfair title. There was in fact a 12th century Renaissance. Not to mention the educational edicts of Alfred the Great and Charlemagne. Yet now "The Dark Ages" is a commonly used term.
It just goes to show what can happen when someone influential coins a catchy phrase.