10 Reasons the "Dark Ages" Were Not Dark

[fisharmor]

And keeping Western Civilization morbidly ignorant and servile...

The best way to do that has already been demonstrated to be keeping the populace in abject ignorance of history.
Personally, I'm not going to remain servile. You're welcome to, though.

 

[Petar]

The best way to do that has already been demonstrated to be keeping the populace in abject ignorance of history.
Personally, I'm not going to remain servile. You're welcome to, though.

Are you honestly trying to say that people were particularly bright or open-minded during the period commonly known as the "Dark Ages"?

I'm pretty sure that they were just a bunch of illiterate religious fanatics that were terrorized by an evil gentry in conjunction with an even more evil religious aristocracy...

 

[Occam's Banana]

And I'd like to know how much of #1 ("Agricultural Boom") was actually due to 25% of the population dying off in the mid-1300s from the Plague. If you think about it, the late 1300s was probably a great time to be alive for just that reason - plenty of land out there, and plenty of opportunity. After the Plague, Europe had something like 1,000 fewer villages - they simply lost the entire population from death or people moving on.

Well ... if you think about it, the 1300s occurred approximately 300 years after period from 476 AD to 1000 AD (the range of dates with which the article is explicitly concerned).

So I'm guessing any plague die-offs in the 1300s didn't contribute much, if anything ...

 

[acptulsa]

The article is silly and so is the whole thread.

 

[fisharmor]

Well ... if you think about it, the 1300s occurred approximately 300 years after period from 476 AD to 1000 AD (the range of dates with which the article is explicitly concerned).

So I'm guessing any plague die-offs in the 1300s didn't contribute much, if anything ...

I keep getting thrown off by the fact that there is no "Dark Age" artwork in the article at all. It's all medieval.
My mind keeps associating the whole thing with the 1200-1400 range because they didn't do any homework for the graphics.

 

[fisharmor]

Are you honestly trying to say that people were particularly bright or open-minded during the period commonly known as the "Dark Ages"?

If they were more open minded than people who come into threads about an article without reading the article and then make generalized pronouncements about how they're "Pretty sure" something was the case based on the local atheist newsletter's insane rants, then they're still ahead of the game you're playing.

 

[Petar]

If they were more open minded than people who come into threads about an article without reading the article and then make generalized pronouncements about how they're "Pretty sure" something was the case based on the local atheist newsletter's insane rants, then they're still ahead of the game you're playing.

They would not have been able to read the article because they were illiterate.

 

[Henry Rogue]

Lol, I must have remembered it wrong.:o
I'll stick to what I know, aviation history.

]Good gravy there's so much misinformation in this thread already I'm not sure where to start.
Let me just throw some verifiable facts out.

Beer has been around since like 4000BC.

Hundreds of years before Galileo, churches were installing astronomical clocks capable of predicting stellar events. Churches were hubs of scientific activity.

There was no monolithic institution prior to the Scholastic period. The first thousand years of Church history is a history of sorting out internal heresies. If you don't know what the terms "Nestorian", "Pelagian", "Arian", or "Monophysite" mean, you don't really have a chance of understanding how non-monolithic things were. Each of these ideas goes back as many as 1800 years and yet still exists today somewhere, and the reason is precisely because it never occurred to anyone to put them down violently.

In this sense #6 on the list is pretty wrong. The Scism of 1054 was a long time in the making. It didn't just happen one day.