February 10, 2025

On Dark Ages

On a history of textual survivals and using medieval analogies well

Modern Medieval

by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele

We spent the weekend after the New Year in New York at the annual conference of the American Historical Association, mostly talking about writing history.

At the book exhibit, I (David) ran into a book called Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory and my initial reaction was: “Oh no. Not again.”

But behold! This isn’t a book that uses “dark ages” as a casual pejorative without considering the history of the phrase! What’s more, it points to one way that doing public work as historians can make a difference in unexpected arenas.

In general, the way that technology writers (including historians of technology, like Prof. Milligan) adopt phrases associated with medieval history isn’t great. The last few years have seen an explosion of people comparing major platforms to “feudalism,” arguing that techbros want to make us serfs. In addition to being based on a myth, this framing lets capitalism off the hook, because these huge companies attempting to monopolize are lives aren’t a throwback to the Middle Ages - they’re a product of modernity, of capitalism! It’s also easy for technologists to use the past as a reason to heedlessly accelerate into the future in order to avoid “the fall of Rome” or whatever.

But it’s also true (according to this book) that in the late 90s various tech folks started talking about a “digital dark age,” and how to avert the loss of information. This book is the story of the people and organizations (public and private) who imagined how to archive information, institutionalized the practice, and then were quickly put to test after 9/11. Milligan uses the archiving practices of that day, many put into full operation (and stress tested) within hours of the attacks, as evidence that this particular “digital dark age” was, in fact, averted.

In the Introduction, Milligan talks about Dark Ages:

In adopting the moniker of a “digital dark age,” commentators and pundits were drawing on a long historical tradition of using this evocative understanding of the past. The framing of the digital dark age itself draws on an apocryphal understanding of the past. The period between the end of the western Roman empire and the Renaissance was erroneously understood in the past as a period of “darkness.”…While the term has fallen out of historiographical use, there is still a popular understanding of the medieval era as a dark, superstitious, violent time (one rarely uses the adjective “medieval” as a compliment). Due to this legacy, the “dark ages” is a useful term for cultural commentators. As Matthew Gabriele and David and Perry note, “the particular darkness of the Dark Ages suggests emptiness, a blank, almost limitless space into which we can place our modern preoccupations whether they’re positive or negative.” For early Renaissance thinkers, the concept of the dark age was useful for drawing distinction between the darkness of the recent past and the brightness of antiquity, which hopefully denied continuity between the Roman Empire and the holy Roman empire. The term and the historical implication stemming from it, have thus been useful to commentators for centuries. (4)

So, one might quibble with some of this but Milligan isn’t saying that “dark ages” is correct, only that pundits find it useful which is, alas, true.

He continues:

Compounding this, recordkeeping practices have always impacted our histories and led to conclusions and exclusions… Selectivity around sources also influenced the western European historiography and helped contribute to the dark age framing. Historian Patrick Geary notes that “what we think we know about the early middle ages is largely determined by what people of the early eleventh century wished themselves and their contemporaries to know about the past.” The Dark Ages are less of a product of their own time – and more the outcome of decisions made by successors about what records to retain. (5)

And this is even better. He’s thinking critically about the framing of the past as a “dark age,” citing an extremely important medieval historian (Geary) and drawing from The Bright Ages to think about the work that the term “dark ages” does rhetorically. And noting that it’s a constructed narrative of the past that does work - work for the Renaissance scholars, work for us.

One of the things that popular writing does, if informed by deep scholarship, is to offer a framework for non-experts who need one. It’s really an honor to see our book put to use in this way.

I like to joke about The Dark Ages, usually starting in 1307 with the birth of Petrarch, then ending in the 25th century or so. Behind that joke is a conviction that while this era produces so much text, someday historians will wonder at the relative lack of information coming from our time. A good printed book on high quality paper that lasts that can survive for centuries (and they do!). A cheap book won’t last. Digital writing may survive in scattershot bits and pieces, but it’s hard to imagine what that will look like.

Milligan’s book points points out that although perhaps hard to imagine now, the history of the recent past shows that web archivists (among others) are right now trying to avert a digital dark age. I hope they succeed.

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