Gospel Vision

Call It ‘Medieval’, Call It The ‘Middle Ages’, But Don’t Call It The ‘Dark Ages’

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Chevas A. F. Balloun Email

Founder and editor of Gospel Vision, Co-founder of Consol.io and Artifact.tools, Christian, husband, and father of three. His professional career is in design and creative endeavors and his builder-mentality drives entrepreneurship for the purpose of adding blessing to the world. Having blogged since 2006, he is a practiced writer and thinker. He has a bachelors in Comparative Religion from the University of Washington and his high conscientiousness makes him a seeker of truth and a self-motivated learner.

A few of us writers here have expressed this sentiment in our own personal conversations. The term ‘Dark Ages’ is ripe with chronological snobbery, it’s inaccurate, and it’s misleading. Author and historian, Simon Winder, would firmly agree and he just posted an excerpt from his book Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe’s Lost Country that expounds on our propensity to call it the Dark ages.

One of the main reasons Winder offers is that the physical material of those civilizations were destroyed and overwritten by modern towns and cities built in the same places, thus obscuring their cultural contributions and significance. The term ‘Dark Ages’ comes from our modern, over simplified thinking about these gaps.

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