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Ever since the times of Greeks and Romans, thinkers and historians have looked at the west1 from the standpoint of European “cultural experiences.”2
In other words no matter how we look at the West, “its historic heartland is Europe.”3 There is no other opinion as to the fact that it fathered and then mastered the art of living inherited by the entire west, even the non-European genre of it. But other influences on that mastery need to be acknowledged as well. To pursue that end, one major misconception that surrounds the medieval part of it must be addressed first, and that is the notion of considering it as the “Dark Ages.”4 To consign a period of history by that particular taxonomy is to deny all that was of any value in that era. But we find volumes after volumes of works on the European Middle Ages, emphasizing upon the splendour of its art, the grandeur of its castles, the subtlety of its poetry and philosophical thought and that too by none other than western writers and historians themselves.
The acceptance of this era as the period on which were built phenomenal movements l ike the Renaissance and the Reformation has been reawakening in certain academic quarters since the early twentieth century. But the general understanding is still that of Petrarch (1304-1374) who coined it in the 1330's to denote the thousand years that had preceded his era as the “Dark Ages.” It has thenceforth come to be used as a term of disgrace and ignominy, thought of as a period of intellectual darkness, decadence and decline. The Latin expression for the “Dark Ages” Saeculum Obscurum was perhaps originally used for political turmoil in the tenth and eleventh centuries,5 but later came to be synonymously used for the entire Middle Ages and not only for the early phase as some tend to believe.
It had seemed to the Italian humanist Petrarch that the Roman Empire “had fallen to the barbarians and that barbarism had continued ever since.”6 Surrounded by “dense gloom” and “sleep of forgetfulness”7 Petrarch and his followers deemed the era to be devoid of the radiance and glow that had made antiquity such a glorious past and hence, his classic periodization of European history....