7 ms·

The term "Dark Ages" is not used by historians any more. And it's doubly odd because these rules, from Charlemagne's times, were the very cause of the "Caroling

• whearyou 6y ago
  As far as I understand this would have been post-dark ages if it's during or after Charlemange
• elliekelly 6y ago
  Is there a good source where I can read more about this or can you elaborate a bit? Why don’t they use the term and what term is preferred instead? Edit: Oddly enough, the Wikipedia article[1] includes a few sentences/references about how and why the term is no longer considered accurate by historians (it “mischaracterises the Middle Ages as a time of violence and backwardness“) yet Wikipedia continues to use the term “Dark Ages” as the article title. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
  • pradn 6y ago
    The article simply uses the term in the title so it can discuss it. Historians prefer the Middle Ages or the Medieval Period. Since this is relatively Europe-centric, historians are trying to go in the direction of "global Medieval studies", to form connections among various regions of the world. Our periodization is largely Eurocentric. The very long lineage of metallic/tool-based terms like the Bronze Age run into the obvious problem that bronze arrived in different regions at different times.
    • Karawebnetwork 6y ago
      > The article simply uses the term in the title so it can discuss it. The words "Dark Ages" do not appear in the text. This is the HN post title.
      • pradn 6y ago
        Oh, I thought they were talking about the Wikipedia article's title.
        • Karawebnetwork 6y ago
          I think you're right. It was a bit vague and I thought it was about the article's title itself.
  • zippy5 6y ago
    If the people looking to learning about this subject have the “dark ages” misconception, is it so bad to make it easy to find via search and then explaining the nuances of the misnomer?
  • jrumbut 6y ago
    I can recommend Norman Cantor's Civilization of the Middle Ages for a really great review of the different views of what happened during and after the deterioration of the Western Roman Empire. They range from "a time of violence and backwardness" to "a lot of people may not have noticed." It's really a great book overall and easier to read than you might expect. He also wrote Inventing the Middle Ages which sounds like it might be more focused on your question but I haven't read it so I don't know.
    • billfruit 6y ago
      Is John Huizinga's Autumn of the Middle Ages, a good source as well?
      • jrumbut 6y ago
        I haven't read it and am no expert, but from the summary it seems like Huizinga believes that the increasingly elaborate customs of the aristocracy in the late Middle Ages was a coping mechanism to deal with the intense violence of the period. Cantor says almost the opposite, that they developed these customs as a marker of their high status and a way to exclude others after they had outlived their original role as the fighting class once cavalry charges were no longer a dominant tactic. This is one of the rare moments in Civilization where the specifics of weapons and warfare are discussed, anyone looking for information on crossbows and lances will be dissappointed.
    • Balero 6y ago
      I found this podcast series really good for the fall of the Roman Empire. Long, but really good! https://soundcloud.com/fallofromepodcast https://soundcloud.com/fallofromepodcast
    • neaden 6y ago
      Not to mention a lot of people benefited, like all the slaves or people on the margins paying taxes for little benefit.
  • jkingsbery 6y ago
    At the risk of stating something obvious, Wikipedia's article on the Carolingian Renaissance is a good place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_Renaissance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_Renaissance The term I've seen in books I've read lately is "Early Middle Ages" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages#Early_Middle_Ages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages#Early_Middle_Ages). "Dark Ages" is arguably applicable to the time around 500-800, although the other problem is that there's also another commonly referred-to time period known as the Dark Ages, the Greek Dark Ages, from around 1100 BC - 750 BC.
  • jcranmer 6y ago
    > yet Wikipedia continues to use the term “Dark Ages” as the article title. The article is about the history of the term "Dark Ages", why shouldn't that be the the title? If you go by link counts, there are 741 links to the Dark Ages page but 2582 to the Early Middle Ages instead. > Why don’t they use the term and what term is preferred instead? "Dark Ages" is itself somewhat ambiguous. In its original incarnation, it referred to the entirety of the time between the "Fall of Rome" (itself hard to specify) and the Renaissance, as its early users saw Rome as the pinnacle of human civilization and looked down on everything following the end of Rome as unimportant, at least until they themselves were bringing back the splendor of Roman civilization. Later scholars were instead nostalgic for the High or Late Medieval civilization, so instead they narrowed the term to exclude their favored era, resulting in it referring to only the Early Middle Ages (to ~1000). Some people go further still and exclude the Carolingian Renaissance from the Dark Ages, pushing its end date further still to 800--there's no neat alternative term for this range, but Age of Migrations covers much of the themes. In any case, periodization of that time period of European history is immensely challenging. The decline of the Roman Empire brings with it a decline in the written record and our knowledge of events in the period diminishes drastically, only recovering with the Carolingian Renaissance. Furthermore, the Roman Empire doesn't fall in an easy cataclysmic moment (there's no Battle of Hastings here), but instead disintegrates at different rates in different parts of Europe, with the final vestige only falling in 1475 (Principality of Theorodo). Meanwhile, there are several overlapping themes going on: the rise of Post-Roman kingdoms (such as the Franks and the Lombards), a mass migration of peoples (including the Anglo-Saxons and various Slavic groups), the Viking Age, the birth of Islam, the Great Schism between Eastern and Western Christianity (and other schisms within those sects!). For the boundary between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern, you can point to "about 1500" and note that several major changes happen about the same time (including total conversion to gunpowder weapons, Protestant Reformation, discovery of the New World, and the Fall of Constantinople)--that doesn't exist between Antiquity and the Middle Ages.
    • michaelpb 6y ago
      "The Roman Empire never fell, DEBATE ME" Though seriously, thanks for writing this up. This is a great explanation of how periodization says more about the "periodizer" than it represents some sort of objective truth about history, magically divorced from the political reality of successive historical writers. Debunking bad history is important... in this field (CS) I've definitely met my share of so-called "STEMacists" whose mental model of history sometimes seems to be derived from Deus Vult memes... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• Klwohu 6y ago
  Historians use the term frequently.
  • AlotOfReading 6y ago
    This doesn't match my experience at all, so can you expand on it? All of my medievalist friends all hate the term and both of the Wickham books in my possession have disclaimers about it in the intro.
• hnmullany 6y ago
  Yes the point of using "Dark Ages" was to point out the dissonance between the detailed instructions on how to manage an estate and the idea that this was a period of total chaos & disorder