The term “Dark Ages” is often used to describe the period of European history between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. This term was created by the Italian scholar Petrarch in the 19th century. His use of the terminology was created to put a negative look onto this period. Petrarch sees Classical Antiquity as a better age so by calling the period “Dark” it already gives off the impression that something bad must have happened during that time. This period of history is usually described as a time of turmoil and suffering, leading to much death and destruction. It was also a time when science and the arts were in a decline. But that is not quite true.
The term “Dark Ages” is actually an inaccurate and even offensive description
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It saw advances in many scientific and technological areas, such as the agricultural revolution. In medicine and engineering, innovations such as glass production, the printing press, and paper manufacture were made. And finally, the vernacular literary form allowed for greater regional and linguistic variation in writing, which in turn helped the spread of knowledge and ideas.
Therefore, the term “Dark Ages” is hugely inaccurate and can be seen as an offensive oversimplification of a complex period of history. As such it should be avoided in order to avoid hurting any sensibilities or giving a distorted view of history.
It is offensive because we associate “dark” with “bad” and “light” with “good”. It is natural, to a point, to associate these words that way; Jesus comes from a light and Satan from the dark, Darkness is scary and we can not see anything, we get cold in the dark and hot in the sun…But that, unfortunately, is not where these associations stopped. Humans always associated dark skin with negativity and light skin with positivity and that way created a huge racial droplet when it came to these differences. The further down we go in history, the more we see how people have divided these words, and many others, and made one into a negative or a positive thing. This all creates an issue because when Petrarch called the Dark Ages “The Dark Ages”, he did it with the intention that these ages were, in fact, bad just because it was not what he thought was important. And he