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The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

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Re: The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

#101

Post by ganzuul »

astrodust wrote: post #17
caiocaiocaio wrote: post #11

Most of the time historians use the phrase 'Dark Ages', nowadays, they mean the time from roughly the mid-sixth century to about Charles Martel, where there are only a handful of written and architectural records remaining, almost all from the margins of Europe. His examples are mainly before or after that time period. But even accepting his much more broad time period - and one of his examples is more than 100 years…

There's probably more records remaining than we realize because of the rampant recycling of old parchment.

Or they started using papyrus, which does not age well.

AFAIK the 'Dark Ages' refer to our lack of records only, and the rest is misunderstanding.

Re: The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

#102

Post by the_af »

gonehome wrote: post #19

This seems like a perfect example of someone who needs to read pg’s essay “write like you talk”: http://paulgraham.com/talk.html I don’t get an intelligence vibe from this style of writing - it mostly just sets off my bullshit alarms.

What is specifically triggering your bullshit alarms? I'm intrigued. I like to think my own bs alarms are very sensitive, but in this particular case they remain silent; the prose seems only mildly flowery to me, and no assertion seems like pseudoscience or quakery.

Re: The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

#103

Post by coliveira »

ddebernardy wrote: post #67
viburnum wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not societal breakdown, that just means the inbred aristocracy doesn’t go back to antiquity. Society and its rulers are not the same thing.

Still, there were families in those days with unfathomable wealth. If memory serves me well, one was so wealthy that when they sold their land after becoming Christians they caused a real estate crisis across the Roman Empire. (Source: The inheritance of Rome, Chris Wickham, one of the early chapters.) And just a few centuries earlier, Julius Caesar arguably was one of the richest to have ever lived on earth. It's se…

Well, wealth during that period was determined by military power, not by an International system as we now know. Without a good army there was no way to maintain land ownership, for example. Similarly, slaves could only be maintained by the threat of armies. Therefore, all the fabulous wealth of Roman families declined to practically nothing with the end of the Roman Empire.

Re: The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

#104

Post by beat »

factsaresacred wrote: post #49
beat wrote: post #15

"The Dark Ages" is also a Eurocentric view of history. What was going on in the Islamic world? In China? The Dark Ages of Western Europe were the brilliant Tang dynasty in China; and the explosion of Islam across the Middle East and across to India, bringing with it tremendous scholarship and economic prosperity.

> "The Dark Ages" is also a Eurocentric view of history. That's like describing 'The Great Leap Forward' as a Sino-centric view of history. "The Dark Ages" refers to a time as well as a place. Specifically, Western Europe.

Is it, though? I think it's clear that "Great Leap Forward" was China-specific, but "Dark Ages" isn't really taught as specific to western Europe.

Which is the problem.

Re: The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

#105

Post by dpark »

foldr wrote: post #92
dpark wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming you're using "an affect" in the sense of "an affectation" or "affected" here, in which case, no. Plainness, simplicity, straightforwardness are words that would describe "as spoken" writing. They are also literally antonyms of "affect" in this context, which would mean pretentiousness, artificiality, pomposity.

I just mean that there's nothing inherently sincere about plainness and simplicity. Some people adopt a plain and simple style disingenuously, and others write in a more flowery style out of a genuine aesthetic motive. In French, 100 years ago, the kind of style you're advocating would have been the "marked" case. That is, readers would probably have attributed disingenuous motives to someone who chose to write a his…

> * That is, readers would probably have attributed disingenuous motives to someone who chose to write a history book in the style of spoken conversation.*

Okay, but they'd also probably be able to understand it. So, tradeoffs.

Re: The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

#106

Post by beat »

Amezarak wrote: post #58
beat wrote: post #15

"The Dark Ages" is also a Eurocentric view of history. What was going on in the Islamic world? In China? The Dark Ages of Western Europe were the brilliant Tang dynasty in China; and the explosion of Islam across the Middle East and across to India, bringing with it tremendous scholarship and economic prosperity.

> the explosion of Islam across the Middle East and across to India, bringing with it tremendous scholarship and economic prosperity. This is a very misleading description of what happened. The early Muslim conquests caused major disruption in the Middle East, otherwise known as the Roman and Persian Empires, as cities which had been full of scholarship and prosperity for centuries were invaded and the population con…

Those same Muslim scholars were the ones who preserved and promoted Greek texts that were destroyed by early Christian fanatics.

Re: The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

#107

Post by the_af »

pthomas551 wrote: post #89
mikeash wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s good advice but it’s also highly dependent on culture and time. It’s food advice because the English-speaking culture of today values writing that sounds like speech. It may not have been good advice at all for someone writing in 1920s France. And beyond that, it’s really hard to apply this sort of advice to a translation.

Yeah, written English corresponds to spoken English more than in a lot of other languages, where the vocabulary and grammar can vary considerably between the written and spoken word.

> written English corresponds to spoken English more than in a lot of other languages

Except for pronunciation! ;)

Re: The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

#108

Post by the_af »

gonehome wrote: post #93
foldr wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quoted text isn't at all unclear (especially taking into consideration the fact that it's a translation).

The quoted text is verbose and tedious. It uses a lot of complex words to convey little information, both of these things negatively affect clarity. You may have a preference for purple prose, but it's silly to pretend that the quoted text is clear. I'm suspicious when people write like that because it can be used to hide bad reasoning behind unnecessarily complex word choice and sentence structure. If you care about…

Can you point to an example of purple prose in the text? I'm curious because I don't see any.

Re: The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

#109

Post by losteric »

beat wrote: post #41
szemet wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, we should rename the Thirty Years' War to "Thirty Years' War in Europe but mostly peace elsewhere", and then we can can call World War I and World War II simply War I and War II - if we assume by default that every event is global (maybe we should add "except Switzerland,etc..." there too...) Just joking: IMHO if someone knows what dark ages was, usually know where it was... It is that simple!

It's not that simple, though. A lot of people - a lot of people - have no idea that during the "Dark Ages", huge swaths of the rest of the world (larger than Western Europe) were going through a Golden Age. It took me rather a while to realize that myself. And, since WWI was fought in large part over colonial resources and Japan was involved, and since Japan was a major power in WWII (and China was involved as well,…

When you read that chapter in K-12, the textbook was no doubt very clear to put the Dark Ages in context of European history... you, and many other students, simply forgot. An elaborate or nuanced name wouldn't have helped retain time/location.

To be fair, other regions of the world have never heard of "the Dark Ages". History is too big for the layman to avoid simplification.

(although, renaming it "the Lost Ages" seems like it would help clarify things)

Re: The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

#110

Post by coliveira »

cerealbad wrote: post #70
mason55 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we know, is this because of a change in society, such that it became difficult or less important to track these things? or is it because of a change in the people, for example people of Roman descent mixing with local tribes, like the Franks, and the local tribes didn't have the traditions of tracking the things that would allow us to trace this back?

Tribal cultures tend to have long and complex, even tedious oral histories and initiations into them. With a knowledge keeper, shaman, druid, healer etc. Could be that the old druid power structure was in decline and so the typical transmission of information was interrupted. We know a similar thing happened later to the midwives/fertility women who were persecuted as witches with I suspect dire consequences to infan…

That's a good point. Unfortunately this leads to another cause of destabilization at the end of the Roman Empire: Christianity. You see, Christians precipitated the destruction of the pagan culture, which was the only culture shared by all people in Europe. Not only Roman history and culture was almost erased in that change, but also the oral traditions of nations around the Roman Empire that were also converted by the Christian Church. Of course, the ascension of Christianity as a power is also a result of the decline of Rome itself, so it is not like Christianity caused this, but it was a big factor in the cultural destruction that occurred at that time.
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