[Borges]

The Medievalist Proffesor at my school would explode into a rage whenever the term Dark Ages was used. He reffered to the term as 'Renaissance Propaganda'. Alcuin being his standard bearer.

[uncbob]

Well there sure wasn’t a lot of progress technically medically infrastructure wise given it was almost 800 years

[wideawake]

He reffered to the term as 'Renaissance Propaganda'.

Excellent.

A high school teacher of mine opined that the Renaissance stifled the development of arts and culture in Europe because it encouraged slavish imitation of antiquity rather than continued innovation along the lines of the High Middle Ages.

Clearly an overstatement of the case, but it has some merit. I wonder how many Renaissance poets could have written decent and memorable Italian or French verse rather than the substandard and wholly unmemorable Latin hexameters they left behind.

[RobbyS]

Don’;t think that Gibbon even acknowledged the Renaissance, even though he carried his history up to the fall of Constantinople in 1453.