> It seems like you've decided to demonstrate stereolambda's thesis about "straight up denialism". I did not realise I was denying anything. Could you explain

> It seems like you've decided to demonstrate stereolambda's thesis about "straight up denialism". I did not realise I was denying anything. Could you explain what? What I wrote is that reality is more nuanced than "everything was absolutely terrible", which is the sort of things that people during the Renaissance wrote to feel better about themselves. > The guy who invented the term "Dark Ages" was Petrarch, and he certainly didn't mean that the amount of primary sources had decreased significantly. He didn't need primary sources to learn about the Dark Ages; he could just look around¹. The good thing is that our understanding of things improved quite a lot since Petrarch, and he hasn’t been cutting edge for a few centuries now. Anyway, it is natural that a lack of things like written records and monumental architecture would lead someone to conclude that the most likely explanation was systematic decline. Since then we’ve had primary sources from elsewhere, and archaeology techniques that had no equivalent back then. > The standard rebuttal to your sort of denialism is […] I did not say that there was "no such thing as the Dark Ages", just that the lack of primary source does not imply general decline (and certainly not intellectual). Though yes, otherwise I am in pretty much complete disagreement with this paragraph. This sort of opinion is absolutely not representative of our current understanding of the period. If you are interested in good vulgarisation, the series that starts here is far more convincing: https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i-words https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f... . There certainly was decline in different areas, but the aspects and consequences depend on the location and was not generalised. And how we got there was much more complex than barbarian invasions.