The moyen age had plenty of writing, it's just that most of it was religious writing: hymns and saints' and martyrs' lives, and treatises on the soul and so on.

The moyen age had plenty of writing, it's just that most of it was religious writing: hymns and saints' and martyrs' lives, and treatises on the soul and so on. You have most likely seen the beautiful illustrated manuscripts produced by the monks in monasteries all over Europe. The other thing that I have noticed is that a great deal of the art from the time is wonky and out of proportion. I was recently at the Musée Cluny in Paris and it was really striking how much of the art in there is pretty badly made, as if by very inept creators. La Dame à la licorne stands out in part because it's not that badly made (though mainly because it's an epic multi-piece tapestry that you'll never see the like of anywhere else). I also remember a statue of a saint whose creator was named (I don't remember the name but it was something like "Le maitre de St. Joseph" or perhaps he had the name of a city) and that was obviously head and shoulders above everything else around it in terms of craftsmanship, which had an almost modern quality. Then I went to the Louvre and I noticed again how the art before and after the middle ages very clearly lacks this shoddy and haphazard quality of European middle ages art. The Greeks in particular practically worshipped proportion, and the Italian masters would not be caught dead painting an unbalanced figure, by the looks of it. But also Egyptians and Assyro-Babylonians, and all the earlier cultures seemed to take well-crafted art pretty seriously (the bad artists were probably flayed alive early on ... brrr). So something definitely happened in the middle ages that did not do good to art and culture. Whether it had any impact in everyday life, the ability of people to produce food, build houses, etc, I don't know. There's certainly plenty of architecture that's survived from that time, so clearly not everything deteriorated. Btw, I think it was the same in the Eastern middle ages too. You can see slap-dash ecclesiastical icons in Byzantine churches of the time. And when you visit Ravenna, and see the mosaics in St Vitale (which are from the very early middle ages), it is clear that something was lost in the ensuing years. Perhaps we're about to sink into a new "dark age" (regardless of how "dark" was the original "dark ages"). Maybe we'll get lucky this time too, and the light will not be forever extinguished.