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ASSIGNMENT
The Dark Age And Middle Age
SUBMITTED
TO: SUBMITTED BY:
Dr. Shalini Mohd: Uvais PA
Central
University of Kerala I ECL
Submitted on: 11/9/2014
Introduction
According to M H Abraham, for convenience
of discussion, historians divide the continuity of English literature into
segments of time that are called “periods”. The exact number, dates and number
vary, but there a certain conformed chronological order for English literature.
How can somebody call a number of days as Dark Age and some others as
medieval? Who did give them authority to
categorize so called “ages”? On what basis somebody can say these are dark ages
and these are Middle Ages?
These
are some of the questions that arrive while we generally discuss about ages of
literature or history, periods.
“Periods
in literature are generally named after rulers, historical events, intellectual
or political or religious movements and styles. Most literary periods therefore
have multiple names. What’s worse, some of these names are debated…..”
Daniel
Reed and Tim Horton.
Dark
Age is sometime known age of illiteracy, war, destruction and death. Dark Age
and light age are easy metaphors which are used to describe whether you live in
a good age or bad age. More interestingly, while we hear the Dark Age it would
be quite general to attribute it to fourteenth century Italian poet Petrarch.
In one of his works he writes :
“My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms.
But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there
will follow a better age. This sleep of forgetfulness will not last for ever.
When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the
former pure radiance.” Later on many Italian scholars of fourteenth and
fifteenth century followed him as they having an intellectual and artistic
boom. Janet Nelson tells that in their minds was a time of “ reborn classical
culture, they rescued Greek from near-oblivion, removed errors from Latin,
cleared fog from philosophy, crassness from theology, crudeness from art.”
They divided history into three
parts- there was 1)
Classical age, which is the time of Greek wisdom, 2) Roman power when Jesus Christ walked in
the world, 3) Renaissance, their own time, when everything was better. Actually
from the fall of the Roman empire in the Fifth century they started to call
their own time. Eventually it came to known as the “middle ages”. At the other
hand, some other Italian writers saw it as a time when everything was in
declaim, even the great building of Rome
like the Colosseum was in trouble and
when no one was producing great works of
literature. Even it widely talked
in Europe , the English writing that of
famous historian Edward Gibbon
referred to that time as “the darkness of middle ages” and “ portraying life during this time as full of
either uncultured barbarians, evil tyrants or superstitious peasants.” Later on , by the nineteenth century the
darkages and the middle ages come to be known as the very same thing. Since
then most of the historians have happen to analyze about the medieval period
and its achievements.
Concerning more to English
historians we get a simple conclusion that if there were any dark age in
medieval age it would be right from the early part of it, namely, after the fall of Roman power
in Britain around fifth and sixth centuries. Unfortunately, by the lack
of historical resources we don’t know much about them. Shortly, medieval
academics are more concerned about the dark age in medieval age, but they do
not call it fully as an age of dark age like the other names like Barbarous
age, the Obscure age, the Leaden ages, the Monkish age and the Muddy age. While
we discuss all these things, Early
period, Late period and Caxton and
the English language. Enlightenment and reformation during the
same period too deserve due attention. However, there are lot of issues
and events to take into concern while we discuss the dark age, whether it
starts from the great fall of Roman Empire or the pre-Chaucerian period and to name a few.
Darkages
Following the decline of the Roman Empire, Western
Europe has completely fallen into
cultural and economic deterioration. These days are called the dark ages,
originally for the middle ages as a historical per iodization. The
light-versus-darkness label is used conventionally for this dark age and
following light age. In some areas of Europe
which were drown in dark age is historically unproved by the lack of authentic historical proof.
The term “dark age” originates from the latin word saeculum obscurum , applied
by Caesar Baronius in 1602 to a continuing period in the 10th and 11th
centuries. The term again is used for the 6th to 13th
centuries, the middle ages shortly after the light antiquity and the Italian
renaissance. But wide range of recognition of the achievements during the
middle ages made the label being restricted in application. Later, since the 20th century, it
is used to denote the early middle ages
of 5th -10th century. On because of it’s negative
connotation, modern scholars hardly use the term dark age, finding it
misleading and inaccurate for any part of the middle ages. Italian scholar
Petrarch is said to be known as the first one who used the term dark age in
1330s and he was actually criticizing late latin literature. Petrarch concerned
post-roman centuries as “dark” compared to the light of classical antiquity.
Some of the writers came to say the
intermediate period between classical antiquity and the modern era. As
contrary, 19th century scholars challenging the term dark age by
showing the achievements of middle age and they restricted the dark age to the
early middle ages. Many a developments of 20th century like the rise
of archaeology and other things throw light to those ages and understood much
more things about dark age. Other aspects of per iodization like late
antiquity, the early middle ages and the great migration, depending on which
aspects of culture are being emphasized. Later on, the every studies of “dark
age” in the 19th century
concerned it very critically. But at least they take it rarely for the
indication of an age which lacked artistic and cultural output, including
historical records. The idea of the dark age is started with the Petrarch when
he said : “Amidst the errors there shone
forth men of genius; no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded
by darkness and dense gloom”. The so called term is used very
secularly by Petrarch as he called classical antiquity as an age of light where
many of the writers called it as an age of dark on because of it’s lack of
Christianity. Petrarch happened to see the roman empire as an age which lost
the power of classical latin and greek
texts. Later he wrote that history had
two periods :
1) classical period of greek and roman’s
2) time of darkness
In his last days, he wrote the
epic Africa in which he says : “My fate is to live among varied and
confusing storms. But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long
after me, there will follow a better age. This sleep of forgetfulness will not
last for ever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come
again in the former pure radiance”
Later
in 15th century historian like Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo
developed a tree kinds of history, the that Petrarch said adding a modern. Till
then, period of supposed decline came to known as the middle age. It was Baronius who
attributed to the between the end of the
Carolingian Empire in 888 and the first inklings of the
Gregorian Reform under
Pope Clement II in 1046. After that, during the enlightenment of 17th
and 18th centuries many scholars came to observe religion is
fundamentally opposes reason. On because of that the writers like Kant and
Voltaire called those ages as dark age. On the other hand, Gibbon and others
expressed their own time as “new age”
and before their days as dark age
similarly like Petrarch.
Middle
age
From the 12th century
until the 1470s, the age wildly known as
medieval age in English literature on because of middle english’s use, majorly
as a result of printing press. Mainly after the Norman conquest language get
changed hugely and the great poet like Geoffrey Chaucer arrived and glorified the
age almost likely that of Virgil and Dante. The wild and occasional play of new
language opened a different and creative era to English literature. Unlike the
dark age it’s history is written any many artistic and literary outputs came
into limelight with which the entire English culture said to have published
throughout the whole world either.
Towns : A
new class emerged during the middle Ages; the merchant. The growth of trade and
the merchant middle class went hand in hand with the growth in towns. Town
populations swelled during this period, particularly after the Black Death.
Trade routes grew, though roads remained poor and dangerous, so most goods were
transported by water. Towns were built on trade, and the elite of towns were
the merchants. Merchant guilds-controlled town, government, though they often
clashed with craft guilds for power. Merchants needed stability for trade, so
they supported the king and the establishment of a strong central government against
the rule of individual nobles. The king, for his part, encouraged the growth of
towns and trade. Town charters became a major source of royal revenue.
Conclusion
To conclude, It's clear that there
was a collision in learning and much technical capacity as a result of the
fragmentation and contradictories that
followed the declain of the Roman Empire in Western Europe. In areas such as
southern Gaul or northern Spain, this collision
was a slow decline over several hundred years. In others, such as
Britain, it was much more quick and catastrophic. Modern surveys of
archaeological and documentary evidence, such as those summarized by Bryan
Ward-Perkins show that this means a
clear fall in material culture and technical capacity between the later Roman
era and the seventh century.
Factory-made,
mass-produced ceramics that had been exported to the out corners of the empire were replaced with
rough, homemade pottery. Evidence of luxury goods that exported over long distances disappears from the
record in all but the most elite gravesite finds. Learning was not extinguished
completely thanks to the church's teaching that "pagan" philosophy
was valuable for its own sake and to be preserved. But much was lost in the
turmoil. We have, for example, some correspondence between two monks from the
ninth century discussing mathematical problems that, to modern eyes, look
totally elementary but which were cutting-edge at the time.
This was not due to any
lack of "intelligence." People in the early Middle Ages were every
bit as intelligent as their Roman-era forebears and also just as smart as we
are. But when the whole infrastructure of the earlier culture falls apart under
a complex combination of economic and political failures and your region is
assailed on all sides from successive waves of invaders and wracked internally
by political division and warfare, there tend to be more important things to
apply that intelligence to than building aqueducts or translating Aristotle
from the Greek. If our civilization collapsed, we would still have the
intelligence to design computer games or decorate loft apartments, but we would
be using it to grow food, protect our crops, and survive.
The myth of the Middle
Ages as a "dark age" does not lie in the fact that things declined
markedly after the fall of Rome—they did. It lies in the idea that this
situation persisted until the dawning of something called "the
Renaissance," which somehow rescued Western Europe from the clutches of
the Catholic Church, revived ancient Greek and Roman learning, reinvented
"good" (i.e. realistic) art and made everything OK again.
This is the part of the
story that is the myth.
The revival of material
culture came long before the so-called "Renaissance." It began as
early as the eighth century and was driven by the needs of early medieval
farmers to achieve more with less. With long-distance trade at a low ebb,
European farmers had to be far more self-sufficient, and with populations
lower, they had to be more labor-effective. Technologies and farming techniques
that reduced labor and increased yields became increasingly required and saw an
adoption of changes in the period between 500 and 1200 that revolutionized
agrarian production. The adoption of the horse collar and horseshoes made
plowing more effective, and the wider use of the heavy mouldboard plow meant
that heavy, fertile Northern European soils could be brought under production
for the first time. Watermills began to proliferate through Europe, mechanizing
not just flour production but also a range of other processes once done
manually. This mechanization spread to use of tidal mills and, eventually, to
the invention of lateral windmills. The range of processes driven by these new
machines increased to include sawing masonry, driving trip hammers, automated
forge bellows, and more.
The resultant rise in
production levels and standards of living from these technologies, combined
with the end of the waves of invasion and greater political stability, paved
the way for an upswing in the later Middle Ages. Contact with Jewish and Muslim
scholars in Spain saw lost works by Aristotle, Ptolemy, Archimedes, and many
others translated into Latin and returned to the West. In the same period,
universities began to appear across Europe, setting up a network of
scholarship. This medieval revival also saw further technological innovation,
with major inventions such as the mechanical clock, eyeglasses, effective gunpowder
weapons, and the printing press.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Albert
Edward, History of English Literature, Rev, Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2014
Nagarajan
M S, English Literary Criticism
and Theory Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2006.
Abraham
K.M, Social and Cultural History of Great Britain, Kozha: Institute
of Secularism , 2011 .
www.wiki.org
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