Citations:Dark Ages

English citations of dark Ages, darke ages, darker Ages, dark ages, Dark Ages, and Dark Age

• [1624, George Abbot, A Treatiſe of the Perpetuall Viſibility and Succeſsion of the True Church in all Ages, London: printed by Augustine Matthewes and John Norton for Robert Milbourne, To The Reader:

  Now; of all truth this day in controuerſie, there is none more ſought after by ſome, than the viſibility of the true Church, which retained the purity of the Apoſtles doctrine vnmixed with dregs of errour and ſuperſtition, eſpecially in the gloomy and dark Ages before Luther.]

• a. 1635, Richard Sibbes, A Deſcription of Chriſt, In His neereneſſe to God, In His calling, In His qualification, In His execution of his calling., in John Sedgwick, editor, Beames of divine Light, Breaking forth from ſeverall places of holy Scripture, as they were learnedly opened, in XXI. Sermons., London: printed by George Miller for Nicholas Bourne and Ralph Harford, published 1639, pages 57–58:

  What is the reaſon that former times were called darke times, and ſo they were, the times of Popery, a darke age? Chriſt was vailed, the Goſpell was vailed, there was no preaching of ſalvation by Chriſt alone, people were ſent to ſtocks and ſtones, and to Saints, and inſtead of the word, they were ſent to legends and ſuch things, Chriſt was obſcured, thereupon they were darke ages, thoſe ages wherein the Spirit of God is moſt, is where Chriſt is moſt preached, and people are beſt alway where there is moſt Spirit, and they are moſt joyfull and comfortable, and holy, where Chriſt is truly layd open to the hearts of people; the preaching of meere morallity, (if men be not carefull to open Chriſt, to know how ſalvation is wrought by Chriſt, and how all good comes by Chriſt) it will never make a man perfectly good, and fit him for Heaven, it may make a man reforme many abuſes, like a Phyloſopher, which hath its reward, and reſpect amongſt men, but nothing to give comfort at the houre of death, and the day of judgement, onely that whereby the Spirit is conveyed is the knowledge and preaching of Chriſt in his ſtate and offices.

• [1686 May 20th, Gilbert Burnet, Dr. Burnet’s Travels, or Letters containing an Account of what Seemed moſt Remarkable in Switzerland, Italy, France, and Germany, &c., Amsterdam: Peter Savouret · W. Fenner, published 1687, Book III. The Fifth Letter. From Nimmegen, page 11:

  Their Manuſcripts are chiefly the Latine Fathers, or Latine Tranſlations of the Greek Fathers, ſome good Bibles, they have the Goſpels in Greek Capitals, but they are vitiouſly writ in many places: There is an infinite number of the Writers of the darker Ages, and there are Legends and Sermons without number.]

• 1730, the Marquis Scipio Maffei, translated by Alexander Gordon, A Compleat History of the Ancient Amphitheatres. More peculiarly Regarding the Architecture of thoſe Buildings, and in Particular that of Verona., London: Harmen Noorthouck, Chap. XVI. This Treatiſe is here ended, by giving an Account of the Theatre of Pola, which till now has been taken for an Amphitheatre., page 398:

  And 2dly, ſince I myſelf have ſeen it, I have with no ſmall Probability been able to diſcover that the other Building in Pola [tho’ deſcribed as a Theatre, and accordingly delineated as ſuch by Serlio, and called ſo in the dark Ages, when ſuch Names were given at random] was in effect no Theatre at all, but a magnificent Palace.

• 1837, Henry Hallam, Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries. (Collection of Ancient and Modern British Authors; Vol. CLXV.), volume I, Paris: Baudry’s European Library, chapter i: “On the general State of Literature in the Middle Ages to the End of the Fourteenth Century.”, § 5, pages 3–4:

  A prepossession against secular learning had taken hold of those ecclesiastics who gave the tone to the rest; it was inculcated in the most extravagant degree by Gregory I., the founder, in a great measure, of the papal supremacy, and the chief authority in the dark ages; it is even found in Alcuin, to whom so much is due, and it gave way very gradually in the revival of literature.

• 1857, Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England, volume I, London: printed by Robson, Levey, and Franklyn for John William Parker and Son, Chapter IX. History of the Protective Spirit, and Comparison of it in France and England., page 558:

  When, towards the end of the fifth century, the Roman empire was broken up, there followed, as is well known, a long period of ignorance and of crime, in which even the ablest minds were immersed in the grossest superstitions. During these, which are rightly called the Dark Ages, the clergy were supreme: they ruled the consciences of the most despotic sovereigns, and they were respected as men of vast learning, because they alone were able to read and write; because they were the sole depositaries of those idle conceits of which European science then consisted; and because they preserved the legends of the saints and the lives of the fathers, from which, as it was believed, the teachings of divine wisdom might easily be gathered.
  Such was the degradation of the European intellect for about five hundred years, during which the credulity of men reached a height unparalleled in the annals of ignorance. But at length the human reason, that divine spark which even the most corrupt society is unable to extinguish, began to display its power, and disperse the mists by which it was surrounded. Various circumstances, which it would be tedious here to discuss, caused this dispersion to take place at different times in different countries. However, speaking generally, we may say that it occurred in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and that by the twelfth century there was no nation now called civilized, upon whom the light had not begun to dawn.

• 1903, Frederick Converse Beach, George Edwin Rines, editors, The Encyclopedia Americana, volume VI (D–Eme), New York · Chicago: The Americana Company, published 1904, s.v. “Dark Ages, The”:

  Dark Ages, The, a period supposed to extend from the fall of the Roman empire, 475 A.D., to the revival of literature on the discovery of the Pandects at Amalfi in 1137. Not to draw the limits too finely, say 700 years (450 to 1150). The Middle Ages may be extended to about 1550, covering from 10 to 11 centuries.

• 1904, William Paton Ker, “Introduction” (chapter I, pages 1–23), in The Dark Ages (Periods of European Literature; volume I of XII), New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, page 1:

  The Dark Ages and the Middle Ages — or the Middle Age — used to be the same; two names for the same period. But they have come to be distinguished, and the Dark Ages are now no more than the first part of the Middle Age, while the term mediæval is often restricted to the later centuries, about 1100 to 1500, the age of chivalry, the time between the first Crusade and the Renaissance.

• ibidem, page 7:

  Everything that we can think of in modern poetry (except always the survivals and revivals of Teutonic alliterative verse, and some few other antiquities) is related to the French and Provençal literature of the year 1100 as it is not related to anything in the Dark Ages — the earlier Middle Age.

• ibidem, page 8:

  The Dark Ages in the history of literature are distinctly a period: they have a definite end, whatever their beginning may have been.

• ibidem, page 9:

  The Dark Ages in their more limited meaning, and for the editorial purposes of this Series, are the centuries of the barbarian migration, before the establishment of the Romance literatures, or of the kind of civilisation that is implied in them.

• ibidem, page 10:

  In Latin, which is the principal language of the Dark Ages, there is no such decisive limit,— indeed there is no limit at all to the Latin of these times.

• ibidem, pages 11–12:

  The Latin literature of the Dark Ages has not a definite character of its own, in the same way as the old Teutonic poetry. That body of poetry belongs properly to the centuries from the sixth to the eleventh. The Latin literature of the Dark Ages is not their exclusive property; it begins before them and is continued after them; its period is a much longer one, a period which at the lowest reckoning includes the whole of the Middle Age in the old wide sense of the term, down to the Revival of Learning. Even this is too narrow, for the Latin literature of the Middle Ages is in many things conservative, and it is difficult to stop in tracing it back to its sources: many of its favourite ideas and principles are those of Cicero, and many of them were in his time far from new; and at the other end of the history there may be found a similar difficulty when things supposed to be peculiarly mediæval show themselves proof against the Renaissance, surviving quite happily in the minds and writings of humanist reformers. The German literature of the Dark Ages makes one group of writings with a life and character of its own; the Latin literature is merely a section, with an arbitrary date to mark the dividing-line.

• ibidem, page 12:

  The significant distinction for the Dark Ages is not between Latin and vernacular utterance, but between Latin and barbarian ideas.

• ibidem, page 13:

  Greek in the Dark Ages has influence upon the West for the most part indirectly: either through its old-established partnership in Latin culture, or in ways not literary at all, by means of travellers, pilots, and traders; so that what comes through is generally either ancient, if there is any scholarship in it, or unscholarly, if it is new.

• ibidem, page 14:

  The Arabic literature that was produced in the Dark Ages is not related to the West in any literary manner. The Arabians give scientific matter, and they give the subjects of stories, but their own literature is something apart. It was “ not destined to be ours,” though the student of heroic poetry may turn for a moment from the themes of Attila or Sigfred to admire the temper of the Arabian Dark Ages —“ the Ignorance ”— before the chivalrous imagination of their earlier poets was transformed by the False Prophet and his polygamous methodism.

• 1988, Edward Frederick James, “The Northern World in the Dark Ages, 400–900” (chapter 2, pages 63–114), in George Arthur Holmes, editor, The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe (paperback), Oxford · New York: Oxford University Press, published 2001, →ISBN, →LCCN, chapter title
• 1990, Mark S. Seidenberg, “Connectionism without Tears” (chapter 4, pages 84–122), in Steven Davis, editor, Connectionism: Theory and Practice (Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science; 3), New York · Oxford: Oxford University Press, published 1993, →ISBN, page 84:

  It is clear that many linguists view connectionism as a revival of the radical empiricist approach that dominated the dark ages in psychology — the behaviourist era.

• 1996, Terry Deary, “Nasty Normans” (pages 14–23), in Measly Middle Ages (Horrible Histories), electronic edition, London: Scholastic Children’s Books, published 2016, →ISBN, page 14:

  The bruised Brits had been battered for a thousand years. In AD 43 the Romans ruined them, in the 5th century Saxons savaged them, in the 9th century the Vikings vanquished them. These were the Dark Ages. (No jokes about them being called ‘Dark’ because there were a lot of ‘knights’ around in those days.)
  But in 1066 the Normans finally nobbled them. Even teachers know that William the Conqueror landed in 1066 and won the Battle of Hastings. The Nasty Normans took over.

• ibidem, page 16:

  The Normans had more writers and monks to record the history of their times. We are no longer ‘in the dark’ so much. We’ve left the Dark Ages and entered the Later Middle Ages.

• 2000 March 6th, Network World, volume 17, number 10, page 49:

  Yes, DSL is a better, faster and less expensive way to access the Internet. Unfortunately, it’s saddled with back-office systems that belong in the Dark Ages and politics that may require regulatory oversight.

• 2000 March 28th, Anne Englund Nash, “Torpor and Barbarity” (chapter 4, pages 65–83), in Those Terrible Middle Ages! Debunking the Myths, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, translation of Pour en finir avec le Moyen Âge by Régine Pernoud (in French), →ISBN, →LCCN, page 68:

  However that might be, it was a different order from the imperial order that was instituted during those centuries considered the darkest of the dark ages — those from approximately the fall of the Roman Empire (fifth century) to the restoration of the Western empire by Charlemagne three hundred years later.

• 2001 November 6th, Lawrence Lessig, “Creativity in Real Space” (chapter 7, pages 103–119), in The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World‎^[1], New York: Random House, →ISBN, →LCCN, archived from the original on 29th March 2013, §: Creativity in the Dark Ages, page 104:

  Put yourself back in the dark ages, the time before the Internet took off — say, the 1970s — and ask: What was the environment for creativity then?

• 2001 December, Gene Wolfe, “The Best Introduction to the Mountains”, in David Pringle, editor, Interzone, number 174, Brighton: TTA Press, →ISSN, page 49/1:

  There is one very real sense in which the Dark Ages were the brightest of times, and it is this: that they were times of defined and definite duties and freedoms.

• 2006, Florin Curta, “Southeastern European ‘Dark Ages’ (c. 600–c. 800)” (chapter 2, pages 70–110), in Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500–1250 (Cambridge Medieval Textbooks), Cambridge · New York: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, chapter title
• 2007 Spring, Janet Laughland Nelson, “The Dark Ages” (pages 191–201), in Matt Cook, Marybeth Hamilton, editors, History Workshop Journal, number 63, Feature Periodization: Then and Now, Oxford: Oxford University Press, →DOI, →ISSN, →JSTOR, →LCCN, →OCLC, article title
• [2007, Stephen J. Harris, “Introduction”, in Stephen J. Harris, Bryon Lee Grigsby, editors, Misconceptions About the Middle Ages (Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture; 7), New York · Abingdon: Routledge, published 2008, →ISBN, →LCCN, page 9:

  It was Petrarch (1304–74) who gave us the phrase “dark ages.”]

• 2008, Peter S. Wells, “Between Antiquity and the Middle Ages: What Happened?” (chapter 1, pages 3–12), in Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered (paperback), New York · London: W. W. Norton & Company, published 2009, →ISBN, →LCCN, page 3:

  The glorious civilization of the Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century. After a period of cultural barbarism known as the Dark Ages, Europe finally re-created civilization around A.D. 800 with the rise of Charlemagne, with the Carolingian Renaissance, and with the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire. This is the traditional, and in some minds still the accepted, view of the formation of European civilization in the first millennium.

• 2014, John L. Brooke, “The Global Dark and Middle Ages, AD 542–1350” (chapter 9, pages 350–392), in Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (Studies in Environment and History), New York: Cambridge University Press, →DOI, →ISBN, →LCCN, page 351:

  Climate and disease made Brown’s Late Antiquity a tough time in both hemispheres, perhaps a “Dark Age.” The climatic Middle Ages also have some global coherence, with an early Middle Age running from 900–1275 seeing an optimum in some places, in others quite the reverse, followed by a late Middle Age running to 1550 and encompassing the entering phases of the Little Ice Age.

• ibidem:

  Very broadly and diffusely, the end of a global classical antiquity was shaped in some measure by a climatic global Dark Age running from roughly AD 400 to AD 900. This reversal was coherent in many parts of the world, but it did not have the reach and consequences of the two Hallstatt minimum/Siberian High epochs that bracketed both classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. Rather than a strong Siberian High at work, these climatic Dark Ages were marked in a cold northern hemisphere by a round of North Atlantic ice rafting, and by ENSO variation in the Pacific tilting toward the El Niño mode, with erratic floods and droughts along the Andean coast.

• 2019 June 14th, Taylor Swift, Joel Little (lyrics and music), “You Need to Calm Down” (1:30–1:39), in Lover (digital download · music streaming), performed by Taylor Swift, Republic, →OCLC, track 14:

  Sunshine on the street at the parade, / but you would rather be in the Dark Ages. / Makin’ that sign / must’ve taken all night.

• 2019 November 14th, Martin J. Dougherty, The ‘Dark’ Ages: From the Sack of Rome to Hastings, London: Amber Books, →ISBN, main title