The Dark Ages

In her University of Vienna doctoral thesis, 'Das Schlagwort vom "finsteren Mittelalter"' ('The term "the Dark Middle Ages"'), in 1931, Lucie Varga observed with characteristic sharpness that 'terms are war-cries in cultural history' (Schlagwörter sind kulturgeschichtliche Kampfparole).¹Schlagwort is hard to translate. My 1909 Cassells German-English Dictionary gives 'favourite expression, commonplace high-sounding phrase'; modern dictionaries give 'slogan'. You could almost say that 'The Dark Ages' began as the former and turned into the latter. Conventional term, catchword, stock-phrase, buzz-word, cliché: this particular Schlagwort, whatever else it is, is a simplification with attitude, and staying-power. In producing and reproducing this and other Schlagwörter for the self-evidently useful purpose of periodization, historians assume ownership of the past, but have a lot to answer for.² Period labels are neither inert nor innocent. They attract value-loadings. 'Classic(al)' is good, in modern parlance, in American as in English English, and 'modern' is very good, while 'medieval' is bad. Can 'the 'Dark Middle Ages', or just the 'Dark Ages', be other than very bad?

In the fourth and fifth centuries, Christians had found their own Schlagwörter in the Bible, where darkness and light figured as evocative metaphors.³ Christ's birth and Augustus's empire were looked back on as heralding a bright new age, and, with a little telescoping, Constantine's vision of the triumphant Cross in 312 was seen as confirmation that the darkness of paganism had been vanquished. According to Christian periodizations, we (like medieval Christians) are still living in the fourth and last monarchy predicted in the Book of Daniel, and in the sixth and last age of the last Book of Augustine's City of God.⁴ Once the Roman Empire had seen the light of Faith, Orosius, Augustine's former student, and the author, soon after 417, of a history-book much read throughout the medieval centuries, could give an up-beat account of events in his own lifetime.⁵ A decade or two's revisionist preference for seeing the fourth and fifth centuries in terms of creative 'transformation' is just beginning to give way to a decidedly darker re-view of regression in material culture.⁶

Yet the darkening of the post-Roman or sub-Roman period began much earlier, not so much in the writings of historians, though some of those had their apocalyptically gloomy moments, but in a ninth-century scholar's sketch of the impact of Charlemagne (ruled 768–814): 'the length and breadth of the kingdom committed to him by God, which was clouded (nebulosa) and, if I might say this, nearly completely blind (paene caeca), he made – with light given by God – full of light again (luminosa), and able to see, by a beaming-out of rays (irradiatio) of all learning that was new and in part unknown before to this barbarous age'.⁷ This elaborately-constructed assessment would certainly count as up-beat, were it not followed by a brief and simple sentence: 'But now, with the pursuit of knowledge declining again into its opposite, the light of wisdom, because it is less cherished, is growing dimmer in many people.'⁸ The author, Walahfrid Strabo, a fine latinist and teacher, expressed these paradoxical views in the prologue he wrote for his edition of Einhard's Life of Charlemagne in 840/1, some twenty-seven years after the emperor's death and in the midst of a bitter civil war between Carolingian successor-kings.⁹ The paradox was compounded in his final sentence, where he explained his own editorial work (the adding of chapter-divisions and chapter-headings) as making 'the entry-route shine bright' for the reader who seeks a particular topic.¹⁰ In his cheerier moments, Walahfrid could see himself as living in a 'modern age', thanks to the efforts of Charlemagne. Much of the recent historiography of the Carolingian period is similarly up-beat because of that age's achievements in the realms of high culture – Latin poetry for instance; but there has been admiration too for distinctively religious aspects of that culture – its...