We ignore them at the risk of forever losing our cultural identity which, even for a great many Americans, is rooted in Western Europe.īut there is more scholars keep pushing further back the designation “Dark Ages” and have now excluded from it the eight, ninth and tenth centuries (the era of the so called Carolingian Renaissance, from 700 to 1000 AD). As the founder of the European Union Robert Schuman used to quip: “I never feel so European as when I enter a cathedral.” That statement is revealing and throws light on the fact that those centuries may have shaped the very identity of Modern Western European civilization. Those were the centuries of the cathedrals which still stand there as monuments to an incredibly complex and enlightened civilization, despite the designation of “gothic” as a disparaging term, the equivalent of retrograde and uncivilized, by Voltaire. Scholars have also become aware that the High Middle Ages (the first three centuries of the second millennium) were far from dark and intellectually retrograde. It was the century when ancient Greek and Latin manuscripts preserved in monasteries were discovered and read and discussed once again thus paving the way for the Renaissance, the rebirth of antiquity which, in synthesis with Christianity, produces a unique new civilization. There is a widespread acknowledgment among them (see David Knowles’ The Evolution of Medieval Thought, London: Longman, 1988) that the 14th century i.e., the century of Dante and Petrarca’s Humanism, not only was not part of the Dark Ages but was the essential precursor of the Italian Renaissance. The term “Dark Ages” was once erroneously applied to the entire millennium separating late antiquity from the Italian Renaissance (500-1500 AD).

Western civilization ii quizlet