Its a period that has few surviving written sources, so we don’t know very much about what happened then. Some English historians will say if there is any kind of ‘Dark Ages’ in medieval history, it is during the earliest part of the Middle Ages, right after the fall of Roman power in Britain around the fifth and sixth centuries.

Since then historians have become more positive about the medieval period and its achievements – and the idea that people were living in the Dark Ages is getting used less and less, at least among academic medievalists. By the nineteenth century the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages meant the same thing. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries you have historians like Edward Gibbon referring to this time as “the darkness of the middle ages” and portraying life during this time as full of either uncultured barbarians, evil tyrants or superstitious peasants. However, the term Dark Ages is something usually found in just English writing. The idea of a Middle Ages would spread to other historians around Europe. The Italian writers just saw it as a time when everything was in decline, when the great buildings of Rome like the Colosseum were slowly crumbling and when no one was producing great works of literature. To connect with Dark Ages: World of Darkness, log in or create an account. After a little while it got the name ‘Middle Ages’ (or Medium Aevum in Latin). Dark Ages: World of Darkness is on Facebook. Meanwhile, there were all those centuries in between – from the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century to just before their own time. These writers began to see history as divided into three phases – their was the Classical Age, which was time of Greek wisdom, Roman power, and when Jesus Christ walked in this world and their own time, a Renaissance when things were getting better. Janet Nelson explains that, at least in their minds, they were “confidently believing theirs was a time of reborn classical culture, they rescued Greek from near-oblivion, removed errors from Latin, cleared fog from philosophy, crassness from theology, crudeness from art.” His views would be taken up by other Italian scholars – by the late 14th and 15th centuries they were having an intellectual and artistic boom, and began seeing themselves as following in the footsteps of the ancients. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance. This sleep of forgetfulness will not last for ever. But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age. My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms.

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