| The Jstor article that wikipedia cites as evidence of Petrarch "being the first to develop the concept of 'the dark ages'" https://www.jstor.org/stable/2707236?seq=1 The same wikipedia article says that Petrarch noted for initiating the Italian Renaissance by way of rediscovering letters of Cicero who happens to have died in 43bc. He is then credited with founding Renaissance Humanism in the context of the above. The above claims seem some plausible given the summary texts that mention Petrarch given by the page on Humanism given by the Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/vatican/humanism.html One recontextualization of the concept of the dark ages of the type implied by UncleMeat (my interpretation what was implied, not UncleMeats) is given by this publication by The University of Michigan. https://www.press.umich.edu/15299 This is all very interesting, but I'd like to point out absolutely none of it seems to automatically leave the dilettante historian like myself from coming away with the impression that knowledge, scientific or otherwise, has not been lost in a meaningful way and thus throughout history did not necessitate some obsessed persons to resuscitate it. |