The term "The Dark Ages' has not been used by historians in a pejorative sense for at least 20 years of which I'm aware.
By the end of the Roman empire in Europe, the Christian church had already become hopelessly corrupt.Any negative impact had little to do with religion,and much to do with power and wealth. The history of the church has always been louche at best (like now) and downright sordid and disgusting at worst.(eg under the Borgias)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_%...ography%29
By the end of the Roman empire in Europe, the Christian church had already become hopelessly corrupt.Any negative impact had little to do with religion,and much to do with power and wealth. The history of the church has always been louche at best (like now) and downright sordid and disgusting at worst.(eg under the Borgias)
Quote:When modern scholarly study of the Middle Ages arose in the 19th century, the term "Dark Ages" was widely used by historians. In 1860, as John Barber notes, Burckhardt in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy "formulated the classic contrast between the medieval period as the 'dark ages' and the achievements of the Renaissance as a period of revived antiquity that included literature, elegance and erudition".[29] However, the early 20th century saw a radical re-evaluation of the Middle Ages, and with it a calling into question of the terminology of darkness,[9] or at least of its pejorative use. Historian Denys Hay exemplified this when he spoke ironically of "the lively centuries which we call dark".[30]
When the term "Dark Ages" is used by historians today, therefore, it is intended to be neutral, namely, to express the idea that the events of the period often seem "dark" to us because of the paucity of historical records compared with both earlier and later times.[9] The term is used in this sense (often in the singular) to reference the Bronze Age collapse and the subsequent Greek Dark Ages,[1] the dark ages of Cambodia (c. 1450-1863), and also a hypothetical Digital Dark Age which would ensue if the electronic documents produced in the current period were to become unreadable at some point in the future.[31] Some Byzantinists have used the term "Byzantine Dark Ages" to refer to the period from the earliest Muslim conquests to about 800 AD,[32] because there are no extant historical texts in Greek from this period, and thus the history of the Byzantine Empire and formerly Byzantine territories that were conquered by the Muslims is poorly understood and must be reconstructed from other types of contemporaneous sources, such as religious texts.[33] It is also known that very few Greek manuscripts were copied in this period, indicating that the seventh and eighth centuries, which were a period of crisis for the Byzantines because of the Muslim conquests, were also less intellectually active than other periods.[34] The term "dark age" is not restricted to the discipline of history. Since the archaeological evidence for some periods is abundant and for others scanty, there are also archaeological dark ages.[3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_%...ography%29
