Is it appropriate to talk about the middle ages as a dark period?

Answer 1

No. The Dark ages are usually classified as being between the fall of the Roman Empire, and 1000 ce. They're a point at which Europe is in total political turmoil. By the start of the Middle Ages, certain kingdoms (Ex. England, France, Spain, Portugal have created more firm societies. The middle ages usually are said to come between 1000 ce and the founding of the Americas. There is no doubt however, that certain times during the Middle Ages weredark.

Answer 2

I would say absolutely not; with the exception of periods within the Middle Ages, they were a period of high culture and progress, much maligned by later peoples who may have been motivated to their own ends.

The idea of the Middle Ages is that it was an age in the middle, between the cultural height of ancient Rome and the cultural height of the Renaissance. The idea of the Dark Ages is that they were obscure because few people were writing. If we assess these ideas carefully, we can see that neither is correctly applied to the time from 476 to 1453, nor is either correctly applied to the first half of this period.

The Dark Ages produced measurably less writing than the earlier period of the Roman Empire, but there were times in the Roman Empire when there was remarkably little writing also. One such was the Crisis of the Third Century; it was a time when numbers of men claimed to be emperors at the same time, and there were some among them who commanded armies, governed provinces, and minted coins, but the only reason we even know their names is that they appear on the coins. The Dark Ages were not any darker than this, and the time when the Dark Ages produced very little writing was only about 100 years, not much longer than the Crisis of the Third Century.

The period before the Middle Ages was ancient, and much of Europe under the control of Romans. Calling ancient Rome exemplary of high culture ignores a few facts. For example, at one time the Romans calculate the economics of slavery and worked and fed many slaves with a view to extracting the greatest monetary benefit before they died - ideally in seven years. The ''pater familias'' had the right to accept or reject any child born into his extended family, with the rejects literally tossed out with the trash, where they would be collected by slave traders, raised, and sold, so if some young woman incurred the wrath of her husband's grandfather, she could find her baby was gone with the garbage. The idea of throwing captives into an arena for the entertainment of watching them kill each other or be killed and eaten by animals is well known.

The Middle Ages came after that and before the Renaissance. We are well aware of the things I would note as an example the relatively unnoticed fact that during the Middle Ages, important monarchies, such as the Carolingian Empire, considered witchcraft to be legally merely a superstition, and concluded in their legal codes that execution of an accused witch was murder and a capital crime.

The Renaissance was a time of exploration, but also of cruel exploitation of native peoples. It was a time when the witch hunts grew for isolated prosecutions of a few individuals to national campaigns with executions running into the thousands. It was a time of scientific progress, but oddly also a time of scientific retreat, as medieval advancements in medicine seem to have been abandoned in favor of ancient models.

I would not say ancient Rome or the Renaissance were a worse time than the Middle Ages, just that we should not believe that histories written in or based on the Renaissance are necessarily true.

After the fall of the West Roman Empire, there was a period of a couple centuries in which the Germanic kingdoms that succeeded it reconciled their own laws and customs with those of the Romans. While cathedrals and schools were built in this period, and a few histories were kept, such work was in decline. Nevertheless, we should note that the period of about 752 to 840 is referred to as the Carolingian Renaissance, the period from 867 to 1056 was the Macedonian Renaissance, the period of 936 to 1002 was the Ottonian Renaissance, the Renaissance of the 12th century lasted from 1070 to 1315, and the European Renaissance, which ended the Middle Ages, began in the 14th century, with some historians placing it as early as 1300. Most of the Middle Ages were times at least some historians have at least some parts of Europe in one or another of these Renaissance periods.

As I study the Middle Ages, I am impressed at the level of science and knowledge of the age. We tend to thing of the Middle Ages as a time when people were ignorant, impoverished, illiterate, superstitious, and dirty. The truth is that during the Middle Ages, there were times when people tended to be ignorant and illiterate. But there were also times when people were much better educated and thoughtful. It was, after all, 1000 years and whole continent. As to the charge of superstitious and dirty, I could easily make the case that medieval people were both less superstitious and cleaner than those of the Renaissance.

I would go further. I think it is fairly clear that most of the ignorance the people of the Middle Ages are accused of is not based on the ignorance of which that time is guilty, but on the ignorance of our own time.

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