Patrico, Ryan Sayre. "Not-So-Dark Ages." NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE June 26, 2009.

Brague, Rémi. The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Trans. Lydia Cochrane. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. The largest balloon pricked by Brague is the legend of the Dark Ages — that the medieval world was somehow unthinking, brutish, and unimportant: “The legend of the Middle Ages as a time of shadows and darkness is a legacy from the Renaissance, then the Enlightenment, and carried on by a certain variety of positivism.” In the 14th century, for example, Petrarch promoted a “new literary school that was supposed to have put an end to the obscure.” The word barbarian suddenly regained popularity, and the term was expanded to include “Germanic peoples and even monks and Turks.” According to the French humanist Rabelais, “The time was still dark and smacking of the infidelity of the Goths, who had brought all good literature to destruction.” This trope was picked up again during the Enlightenment by those radicals who were “set on stamping out superstition and crushing ‘fanaticism.’” Thus, Edward Gibbon ends his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by describing his themes as “the rise, establishment, and sects of Christianity” and “the triumph of barbarism and religion.” Brague reminds us that the legend still continues today, with the media always ready “to recall that ‘finally we are no longer in the Middle Ages!’ or to decry the resurgence, ‘well into the 21st century,’ of an utterly medieval barbarity.” Brague is humble about his ability to dispel these myths, and while he admits that “any fast-talking media star can do a thousand times more in one minute to perpetuate falsity than we library rats can do in ten lifetimes to unmask it,” he nonetheless does his “utmost to destroy” these legends — or, as he puts it, these “teeming vermin.” Brague’s weapon of choice in destroying these legends is his close examination of medieval philosophical discourse: He expertly illustrates that, contrary to popular belief, “medieval thought does not escape the phenomena typical of thought in general.” Brague’s main task, then, is to show that “people never stopped thinking, that in fact medieval people did a lot of thinking, and that many highly refined concepts were shaped during those years.” . . . Read the rest here: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YWE2NDI4NTMxOTIwOGVkZmIzNDlkMzZlNmQyNTBmYzU=.