Introduction - "There Was No Intellectual Development in the Dark Ages"

Someone said that to me in a history class last spring.  It soon became clear that what he meant by “the Dark Ages” was what I know as the Medieval period.  This got me thinking.  What do many of us see when we look back at the time period between Late Antiquity and the Italian Renaissance?  What about the time between Late Antiquity and the ninth century, sometimes also called “the Dark Ages?”  And what about the Greek Dark Ages?  Why do we call these time periods “dark?”  What about them makes us use that word?  What is it about our time period, our culture, and ourselves that we should use a word like “dark” to describe such times?

That was the impetus for me to start this blog.  Well, that and my love of sharing things I find interesting.  Originally I was just going to focus on common misconceptions about the Classical and Medieval worlds, but in planning what to write about I found that this wasn’t the only thing I wanted to explore.  There’s so much more to see and to discuss and to share.  We credit the Classical past with the birth of democracy and philosophy, with the rise and fall of emperors.  We consider the Middle Ages to have been a time of chivalry and feudalism and capricious monarchs.  I wanted to look at what popular culture says happened and compare it to what I’ve studied.

A Note on Sources:  The majority of the information that will appear here comes from notes I took in class and from books I read in college that I kept when I graduated.  When I can, I’ll list some books for further reading.  A lot of this information can also be found on Wikipedia.  It’s not a source you want to use without double-checking the facts elsewhere, but it’s a good place to start.