dark age

See also: Dark Age

English

Alternative forms

• darke age (obsolete except archaic)

Noun

dark age (plural dark ages)

1. A time period characterized by ignorance, decline, stagnation, and/or conflict and turmoil.
   • 1849, Jonathan Crane, A Historical Sketch of the Second Congregational Church in Attleborough, page 44:

     It is not becoming in us to cast reproach upon those who lived in the daybreak of a dark age, for not seeing clearly all that we see in the more perfect day.

   • 1881, Edmund A. Beaman, Swedenborg and the New Age, page 183:

     That, as then conceived of, was the Christ for that dark age, for men too carnal-minded to conceive of Him or have Him revealed to them in His higher, true character.

   • 1890, The True Life: As Lived and Taught by Mary Hayes-Chynoweth, page 339:

     The dark age that I have alluded to is one that affected all Europe, and to-day the relics of this barbarous past rule all mankind.

   • 1904, William Paton Ker, The Dark Ages, page 343:

     The eighth century was the dark age in Greece ; after that , though learning revives, more of an effort is required to keep up the forms of ancient Greek scholarship.

   • 1927, Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford, Antiquity - Volume 1, page 438:

     Newton's comparison of himself to a child on the seashore might be taken as evidence that the classical age of modern physics was a dark age and knew it.

   • 1998, Richard J. Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left, page 64:

     How would the "dark age" of plutocratic dominance come to an end if reformers remained withing the walls of the monasteries.

   • 2000, Sylvan Lee Weinberg, The Golden Age of Medical Science and the Dark Age of Healthcare Delivery:

     But paralleling what can only be called a golden age of medical science, there is what I must reluctantly refer to as a dark age of health-care delivery.

   • 2012, Joseph Shrock, A Dialogue on Opposing Worldviews:

     Postmodernism is, indeed, a dark age for philosophy.

   • 2014, Inge Vanfraechem, Antony Pemberton, Felix Mukwiza Ndahinda, Justice for Victims, page 67:

     Schafer (1968) calls this era a 'golden age for the victims' as the system still had restitution provisions and Jerin (2009) calls it a 'dark age for the victims' as the system weaned away the rights of crime victims by replacing them with new justice processes which gave lesser solace to the crime victims.

   • 2018, James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, page 11:

     The abundance of information and the plurality of worldviews now accessible to us through the internet are not producing a coherent consensus reality, but one riven by fundamentalist insistence on simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. It is on this contradiction that the idea of a new dark age turns: an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity, and in which we look about ourselves in search of new ways to understand the world.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:dark age.
2. A time period about which there is very little information.
   • 1884, The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Volume 4, page 441:

     But if by a dark age you mean an age concerning which we are altogether in the dark ; and as , in applying this to our own , the Subject and Object , we and the age become identical and commutable terms ; I bid adieu to all reasoning by implication, to all legerdemain of inferential logic, and at once bring notorious facts to bear out my assertion.

   • 2017, A.M. Snodgrass, The Dark Age of Greece:

     By his summary treatment he suggests that, for him too, the period after the coming of the Dorians was a dark age, in the limited sense that he knew no more about it than anyone else.

   • 2023, David Day, Illustrated World of Tolkien: The Second Age, page 8:

     Apart from the Akallabêth, these are fragmentary and, to a degree, unresolved, and for this reason the second Age has long remained something of a " dark age " for Tolkien's readers : lost between the mythology of the First and the epic fiction of the Third , its full grandeur was only slowly revealed to the public through the painstaking , almost archaeological efforts of Tolkien's son and literary executor, Christopher.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:dark age.

Derived terms

• digital dark age