Petrarch's Conception of the 'Dark Ages'

Abstract

IN The American Cyclopaedia of 1883 we read: 'The Dark Ages is a term applied in its widest sense to that period of intellectual depression in the history of Europe from the establishment of the barbarian supremacy in the fifth century to the revival of learning about the beginning of the fifteenth, thus nearly corresponding in extent with the Middle Ages'.' This statement from a popular work is merely a reflection of opinions held at that time by quite a few students of the Middle Ages, a fact proved, for instance, by the very title of Samuel R. Maitland's book, The Dark Ages. In this work, which appeared for the first ime in 1889, the author published a number of essays illustrating 'the state of religion and literature in the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries,' thus characterizing as 'dark' centuries like the eleventh and the twelfth which, from the present point of view, represent the climax of the mediaeval period. In the scholarly world this usage of the term 'Dark Ages' was either to be abandoned completely or at least to be restricted increasingly in its application. When in 1904 William Paton Ker published his work The Dark Ages in the collection Periods of European Literature, he stated: 'The Dark Ages and the Middle Ages ... used to be the same; two names for the same period. But they have come to be distinguished, and the Dark Ages are now no more than the first part of the Middle Age, while the term mediaeval is often restricted to the later centuries, about 1100 to 1500.'2 This restricted conception of the term found expression in a newer encyclopaedia, The Americana, in the 1909 edition of which the phrase 'The Dark Ages' is defined as 'a period supposed to extend from the fall of the Roman Empire, 475 A.D., to the revival of literature on the discovery of the Pandects at Amalfi n 1137.' In a similar manner the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911) states that the period from the fifth to the tenth centuries is called 'the dark Age,' and affirms that 'the dark Age was a reality.'4 It is important o note, however, that in the latest (the fourteenth) edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica the term 'Dark Ages' is no longer used. On the contrary, it is explicitly stated that 'the contrast, once so fashionable, between the ages of darkness and the ages of light has no more truth in it than have the idealistic fancies which underlie attempts at mediaeval revivalism.' Therefore, if we use the popular encyclopaedia as a means of ascertaining the nature of opinions commonly held, and the changes in such common opinions, it would seem that the notion of the mediaeval period as the 'Dark Ages' is now