He spent much of his time traveling through Europe, rediscovering and republishing classic Latin and Greek texts. From his perspective on the Italian peninsula, Petrarch saw the Roman period and classical antiquity as an expression of greatness. The first author to describe the notion of a 'Dark Ages' was Petrarch, a late medieval writer. From Cycle of Famous Men and Women, Andrea di Bartolo di Bargilla, c. Main article: Dark Ages (historiography) Petrarch, who conceived the idea of a European "Dark Age". History of the "Dark Ages" misconception Furthermore, despite some early debates, Christians quickly came to accept and adopt the cultural learning of the Greeks and Romans, and they further decided that philosophy and science were handmaidens and precedents to acts of higher Christian learning.Īdvances in many fields were made, and among the most critical developments were the rise of the university in the late 12th and 13th centuries out of the prior cathedral schools that had been established during the Carolingian renaissance, which itself was associated with the rise, for the first time in history, of a class of career scholars engaged in the study of philosophy and learning. Furthermore, a number of periods of intellectual rebirth took place throughout the medieval period, including the Carolingian Renaissance in the 9th century and, more importantly, the 12th century Renaissance. While people traditionally associate the Renaissance with post-medieval intellectual rebirth, the Renaissance is now seen to have initiated in different times in different places across Europe, itself beginning in the Late Middle Ages. Ĭritical analysis of the Middle Ages has, instead, revealed it to have been a period of momentous change and, in many areas, tremendous progress. A prominent misconception is related to the Dark Ages itself, a term traditionally used as a synonym for the Middle Ages to emphasize either its barbarity, or its intellectual ignorance, or the supposed lack of sources which this period is thought to be characterized by, although none of these characterizations have withstood scholarly criticism. State fragmentation and competition characterized much of the history of medieval Western Europe, and this trend would remain true for a long period of history afterwards.Įven as the Middle Ages is increasingly well documented and a number of historians have increasingly focused on writing literature addressing some of the primary misconceptions about medieval history, and as other historians take the alternative approach of highlighting many of the intellectual, scientific, and technological advances that took place during this period, these ideas remain prominent in the public sphere and continue to dominate conceptions about the Middle Ages as a whole. Eventually, the Carolingian Empire was established in the 9th century, reuniting much of Western Europe, but this entity itself collapsed and fractured into a number of states. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, civilization in different parts of Western Europe receded at different rates and at different times.
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