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The Dark Ages is a historical periodization used originally for the Middle Ages, which emphasizes the cultural and economic deterioration that supposedly occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire.〔("Dark age" ) in Merriam-Webster〕 The label employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the "darkness" of the period with earlier and later periods of "light". The period is characterized by a relative scarcity of historical and other written records at least for some areas of Europe, rendering it obscure to historians. The term "Dark Age" derives from the Latin ''saeculum obscurum'', originally applied by Caesar Baronius in 1602 to a tumultuous period in the 10th and 11th centuries.〔Dwyer, John C., ''Church history: twenty centuries of Catholic Christianity'', (1998) p. 155. Baronius, Caesar. ''Annales Ecclesiastici'', Vol. X. Roma, 1602, p. 647〕 The term once characterized the bulk of the Middle Ages, or roughly the 6th to 13th centuries, as a period of intellectual darkness between extinguishing the "light of Rome" after the end of Late Antiquity, and the rise of the Italian Renaissance in the 14th century.〔〔Petrarca, ''De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia'', ed. M. Capelli (Paris, 1906), p. 45.〕 This definition is still found in popular use,〔〔〔, for example. Franklin is a mathematician who is discussing popularly-held misconceptions about mathematics and science, such as that "Galileo revolutionised physics by dropping weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa." From his perspective as a mathematician, he says that the Dark Ages were sometimes very real, citing Isadore of Seville's writing that a cylinder was 'a square figure with a semicircle on top'.〕 but increased recognition of the accomplishments of the Middle Ages has led to the label being restricted in application. Since the 20th century, it is frequently applied to the earlier part of the era, the Early Middle Ages (c. 5th–10th century).〔Ker, W. P. (1904). (The dark ages ). New York: C. Scribner's Sons. Page 1. (''cf''. The Dark Ages and the Middle Ages — or the Middle Age — used to be the same; two names for the same period. But they have come to be distinguished, and the Dark Ages are now no more than the first part of the Middle Age, while the term mediaeval is often restricted to the later centuries, about 1100 to 1500, the age of chivalry, the time between the first Crusade and the Renaissance. This was not the ''old view'', and it does not agree with the ''proper'' meaning of the name.)〕〔Syed Ziaur Rahman, Were the "Dark Ages" Really Dark?, ''Grey Matter'' (The Co-curricular Journal of Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College), Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, 2003: 7-10〕 However, many modern scholars who study the era tend to avoid the term altogether for its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate for any part of the Middle Ages.〔. In explaining his approach to writing the work, Snyder refers to the "so-called Dark Ages", noting that "Historians and archaeologists have never liked the label Dark Ages ... there are numerous indicators that these centuries were neither 'dark' nor 'barbarous' in comparison with other eras."〕〔Jordan, Chester William (2004). ''Dictionary of the Middle Ages'', Supplement 1. Verdun, Kathleen, "Medievalism" pp. 389–397. Sections 'Victorian Medievalism', 'Nineteenth-Century Europe', 'Medievalism in America 1500–1900', 'The 20th Century'. Same volume, Freedman, Paul, "Medieval Studies", pp. 383–389.〕〔 "The stereotype of the Middle Ages as 'the Dark Ages' fostered by Renaissance humanists and Enlightenment philosophes has, of course, long since been abandoned by scholars."〕 The concept of a Dark Age originated with the Italian scholar Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) in the 1330s, and was originally intended as a sweeping criticism of the character of Late Latin literature. Petrarch regarded the post-Roman centuries as "dark" compared to the light of classical antiquity. Later historians expanded the term to refer to the transitional period between Roman times and the High Middle Ages (c. 11th–13th century), including the lack of Latin literature, and a lack of contemporary written history, general demographic decline, limited building activity and material cultural achievements in general. Popular culture has further expanded on it as a vehicle to depict the early Middle Ages as a time of backwardness, extending its pejorative use and expanding its scope. ==History== (詳細はRenaissance; the term "Middle Ages" has a similar motivation, implying an intermediate period between Classical Antiquity and the Modern era. In the 19th century scholars began to recognize the accomplishments made during the period, thereby challenging the image of the Middle Ages as a time of darkness and decay.〔 Now the term is not used by scholars to refer to the entire medieval period;〔 when used, it is generally restricted to the Early Middle Ages. The rise of archaeology and other specialties in the 20th century has shed much light on the period and offered a more nuanced understanding of its positive developments.〔 Other terms of periodization have come to the fore: Late Antiquity, the Early Middle Ages, and the Great Migrations, depending on which aspects of culture are being emphasized. When modern scholarly study of the Middle Ages arose in the 19th century, the term "Dark Ages" was at first kept, with all its critical overtones. On the rare occasions when the term "Dark Ages" is used by historians today, it is intended to be neutral, namely, to express the idea that the events of the period often seem "dark" because of the scarcity of artistic and cultural output,〔Clark, Kenneth (1969), ''Civilisation'' (BBC Books)〕 including historical records, when compared with both earlier and later times.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Dark Ages (historiography)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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