Please don't refer to the early Middle Ages (or any part of the Middle Ages) as "The Dark Ages." The ten centuries from the Fall of Rome to Gutenberg (my preferred bookends) weren't all unicorns & rainbows, but they weren't all "dark" either. They were full of humans being human.
Is the term "dark ages" not a reference to the lack of sources? Because they were certainly dark in that respect.
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Now we're worried about offending people who have been dead a thousand years.
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They were also mostly dark in the other sense. One can relativize to heart’s content, but there are better times and worse times, and those ten centuries were among the latter. “There were no dark ages” is revisionism, typically espoused by the exact forces that made them dark.
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Don't you understand "dark ages" is pejorative and it's wrong to refer to centuries of civilizational collapse where cities couldn't feed themselves in a pejorative way.
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That may be how some interpret the term, but it's not the way the term was originally conceived and is still mostly, used. And there are more sources available to historians than you might think, including forensic, artistic, legal, and literary.
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Who originally conceived it?
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Maybe they had no candles or oil to burn so it was dark at night.
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fewer written sources than some periods yes, but we do have this wonderful thing called archaeology which is a legitimate source in its own right
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They weren’t *that* dark. We’ve had worse. Only mid-evil, really.
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No, it's a reference to societal decline. Here's a good counterargument, explaining why the period AD ~500–1000, at least, really was a “dark age”: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/ … Things picked up after that so I could agree not to call 1000+ “dark”? But 500-1000 was pretty dark.
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There is much in this piece that is incorrect, not just a matter of opinion or up for debate. History is about nuance, not wholesale generalizations & judgements. No one would argue that there was nothing"dark" about the centuries after Rome, but there was beauty too.
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