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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

#61

Post by ghaff »

cerealbad wrote: post #39

I would love to see a reasonable explanation for the rapid development of Western Europe. The henge circles all across the world (including the new world) show an advanced mathematics and astronomy for thousands of years before the rise of settler empires say parity ~9000 BC. Jump forward all the way to the late 1800s and despite the glacial pace of social change in Russia they are still designing one of the best rif…

It's more about attempting to quantify the level of civilization than theorizing about underlying reasons, but I found Why the West Rules for Now a reaaly interesting chronicle about the West (and China) over time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_West_Rules%E2%80%94For...

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

#62

Post by ArtWomb »

ohaideredevs wrote: post #9

I first ran into this theory in the only "alchemy" book (as in, I have no idea what it's actually about) where the author seemed immensely intelligent. Of course, I was too lazy to actually research any of his claims, but he was pretty eloquent: "Paradoxical in its manifestations, disconcerting in its signs, the Middle Ages proposes to the sagacity of its admirers the resolution of a singular misconception. How to re…

Etienne Gilson makes the argument for the designation: "Christian Philosophy," as folks turned to Gospels and revealed truths for inspiration. It offers a clear separation from "Greek Philosophy". As well as encompassing sub schools of thought such as Apostolic, Thomist, Neo-Augustinian and what have you.

In any case, keep the Medieval content coming as it provides the antidote to modern cacophanies. Even putting on a nice instrumental shwam performance on youtube can immediately tune the senses for quiet monastic contemplation ;)

I believe there is a very active and academically rigorous Telegram or Slack channel with >500 members devoted to the period. But I've since deleted both apps and can't recall what it was called!

The trend in Digital Humanities now of course is "collections as data" and performing full corpus linguistic and sentiment analysis.

Internet Medieval Sourcebook Full Text Sources

https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/sbook2.asp

Reprogramming The Museum

https://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2011/papers/reprogramming...

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

#63

Post by choeger »

I think the most plausible explanation is the lack of slaves that stems from the steady downfall of the Roman empire. When Germanic warlords were pretty much forcing their way into the empire they actually accepted the life style of Romans. But a few hundred years later they switched to feudalism. Why, though?

I think that the Roman empire was founded on a source of cheap labor, slaves. It allowed for massively productive agrarian complexes and thus fueled trade and literacy. But when the empire got into trouble, the price of slaves must have risen massively. The consequence must have been famines and less labor for anything else than crops, in particular less professional soldiers.

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

#64

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

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,…

> 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.

I am one of those people, too- I only found out while watching James Burke's Connections series a few years back, and then reading way too much Wikipedia.

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

#65

Post by dpark »

EliRivers wrote: post #53
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.

Having read the article, I disagree. What "style" of writing? The sentences aren't excessive, the language is all fairly common (the author even takes pleasure in simplifying "scramasax", clearly inviting us to take pleasure in it as well). What's wrong with it? It's not meant to be a list of purely literal facts. It's entertaining and a pleasure to read. As for Paul Graham's opinion piece; well, that's just silly. S…

Fossuser’s criticism was not directed at the article at all. It was directed at the Fulcanelli quote given by ohaideredevs.

The Dwellings if Philosophers (as translated) starts out with “Paradoxical in its manifestations, disconcerting in its signs, the Middle Ages proposes to the sagacity of its admirers the resolution of a singular misconception.” This says so little with such absurd wording that it’s almost word soup.

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

#66

Post by FabHK »

AstralStorm wrote: post #6
hodgesrm wrote: post #3

The Dark Ages are something of a misnomer but there does not seem to be any question that levels of literacy, trade, and social organization were lower than the preceding Roman era and than even the latter part of the middle ages after 1200 or so. Indeed much of the 'darkness' is the result of so few written records surviving from the era, which in turn points to far fewer of them being generated in the first place.…

Also "Middle Ages" or "Medieval period". Pretty common though a bit wide.

In German it's "das Mittelalter", ie middle ages.

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

#67

Post by ddebernardy »

viburnum wrote: post #56
xefer wrote: post #28

The thing that stands out for me about this period is the lack of a "descent from antiquity". [1] There is no well-established genealogical descent in Western Europe from antiquity to the modern era. Familial lines of descent can be traced to the very late Roman period, and from the early medieval period to the modern era. But there is a chasm that can't be crossed because the societal norms that allowed families to…

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 sensible to expect that families with that kind of wealth to leave a trace in their ancestry. And yet with rare exceptions they did not.

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

#68

Post by wanderer2323 »

One should be aware reading it that the 'dark ages were not dark' is in this day and age a revisionist argument aimed at diminishing the role and impact of the European Renaissance in shaping our modern art and culture.

Not saying that this particular article is necessarily an example, just wanted to bring an attention to the fact that the this topic is (unexpectedly) political presently and everything presented on it might turn out to be as neutral and scientific as reporting on other hot-button issues of today.

sapienti sat

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

#69

Post by FabHK »

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.

Palimpsests are well understood and mostly accounted for, I'd have thought?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest

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

#70

Post by cerealbad »

mason55 wrote: post #59
xefer wrote: post #28

The thing that stands out for me about this period is the lack of a "descent from antiquity". [1] There is no well-established genealogical descent in Western Europe from antiquity to the modern era. Familial lines of descent can be traced to the very late Roman period, and from the early medieval period to the modern era. But there is a chasm that can't be crossed because the societal norms that allowed families to…

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 infant mortality rates. Originally it's hard for me to believe that people could be that stupid, but if pre-romans you had a loose confederation of naturalist-priests which kept practical knowledge shrouded in magic ritual as a means of exerting power any intergenerational disruption would be catastrophic. I think the Scandinavians have a slightly clearer picture of their descent due to the later expansion of the new religion into their territories. If reading declines I wonder if people will move back to a digitally transmitted oral history as a type of living memory which quickly becomes too vast to comprehend and may lead to similar transmission problems in the future with historians studying unimportant but vast repositories of codebases, the clay tablets of our day to piece together what went wrong with the C++ culture.
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