The Middle Ages is a traditional division of Western European history that roughly lasted from the 5th to the 15th centuries. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, civilization in different parts of Western Europe receded at different rates and at different times. Eventually, the Carolingian Empire was established in the 9th century and reunited much of Western Europe, but the entity itself collapsed and fractured into a number of states. State fragmentation and competition characterized much of the history of medieval Western Europe, and that trend would remain true for a long period of history afterwards. Even as the Middle Ages become increasingly well documented; historians increasingly focus on writing literature addressing some of the primary misconceptions about medieval history; and other historians take the alternative approach of highlighting many of the intellectual, scientific, and technological advances that took place during the period, such ideas remain prominent in the public sphere and continue to dominate conceptions about the Middle Ages as a whole. A prominent misconception is related to the Dark Ages itself, a term that is traditionally used as a synonym for the Middle Ages to emphasize its barbarity, its intellectual ignorance or the supposed lack of sources by which the period is thought to be characterized although all of those characterizations have failed to withstand scholarly criticism. Critical analysis of the Middle Ages has instead revealed it to have been a period of momentous change and, in many areas, tremendous progress. While people traditionally associate the Renaissance with post-medieval intellectual rebirth, the Renaissance is now seen to have initiated in different times in different places across Europe and to have itself begun during the Late Middle Ages. Furthermore, a number of periods of intellectual rebirth took place throughout the medieval period, including the Carolingian Renaissance in the 9th century and, more importantly, the 12th-century Renaissance. Furthermore, despite some early debates, Christians quickly came to accept and adopt the cultural learning of the Greeks and the Romans, and they further decided that philosophy and science were handmaidens and precedents to acts of higher Christian learning. Advances in many fields were made, and among the most critical developments were the rise of the university in the late 12th to the 13th centuries out of the prior cathedral schools, which had been established during the Carolingian Renaissance, which itself was associated with the rise, for the first time in history, of a class of career scholars, who were engaged in the study of philosophy and learning.
History of the "Dark Ages" misconception
The first author to describe the notion of a "Dark Ages" was Petrarch, a late medieval writer. From his perspective on the Italian Peninsula, Petrarch saw the Roman period and classical antiquity as an expression of greatness. He spent much of his time traveling through Europe and rediscovering and republishing classic Latin and Greek texts. He wanted to restore Latin to its former purity. Petrarch wrote that history had two periods: the classic period of Greeks and Romans, followed by a time of darkness in which he saw himself as living. In around 1343, in the conclusion of his epic Africa, he wrote: "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 forever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance." During the 16th- and 17th-century Reformation, Protestants generally had a similar view to Renaissance humanists such as Petrarch but added an anti-Catholic perspective. They saw classical antiquity as a golden age not only because of its Latin literature but also because it witnessed the beginnings of Christianity. They promoted the idea that the "Middle Age" was a time of darkness also because of corruption within the Catholic Church such as popes ruling as kings, the veneration of saints' relics, a licentious priesthood, and institutionalized moral hypocrisy. During the 17th- and 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, many critical thinkers saw religion as antithetical to reason. For them, the Middle Ages, or the "Age of Faith," was therefore the opposite of the Age of Reason. Baruch Spinoza, Bernard Fontenelle, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Denis Diderot, Voltaire, the Marquis De Sade and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were vocal in attacking the Middle Ages as a period of social regress dominated by religion, and Edward Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire expressed contempt for the "rubbish of the Dark Ages." Yet just as Petrarch, seeing himself at the cusp of a "new age," was criticising the centuries before his own time, so too were Enlightenment writers. The concept of the Dark Ages had been in use, but by the 18th century, it tended to be confined to the earlier part of the period. The earliest entry for a capitalized "Dark Ages" in the Oxford English Dictionary is a reference in Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization in England in 1857.
The science historian David C. Lindberg criticised the public use of "dark ages" to describe the entire Middle Ages as "a time of ignorance, barbarism and superstition" for which "blame is most often laid at the feet of the Christian church, which is alleged to have placed religious authority over personal experience and rational activity." The science historian Edward Grant wrote, "If revolutionary rational thoughts were expressed in the Age of Reason, they were made possible because of the long medieval tradition that established the use of reason as one of the most important of human activities." Furthermore, Lindberg noted that contrary to common belief, "the late medieval scholar rarely experienced the coercive power of the church and would have regarded himself as free (particularly in the natural sciences) to follow reason and observation wherever they led."
Misconceptions
Belief in a flat Earth
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