A term which has ceased to have meaning for historians.
The term "dark age" refers to a period of history about which little is known. In the late middle ages/early Renaissance scholars were largely ignorant of the period of Western European history between the fall of Rome and the birth of Scholasticism. As such this period became known as "The Dark Age".
In the Enlightenment Period of the 18th and 19th centuries it became a common motif to treat the pre-Enlightenment period as a period of ignorance and barbarism, something which the now newly enlightened people of Europe had finally freed themselves from. And so the Middle Ages became thought of as a dark, barbaric, and ignorant time, and widespread misinformation abounded about the period, largely rooted in the Enlightenment narrative of European progress and superiority (by the same token, these same "enlightened" Europeans were exploiting and enslaving indigenous populations all over the world, and regarded indigenous cultures as backward, savage, and barbaric, and thus unfit for the same fair and equitable treatment as "good", rational, enlightened European people ought).
As we entered and moved through the 20th century, the twisted optimism of the Enlightenment largely died in the horrors of two world wars. The romanticism of the 19th century and poor scholarship of the time also gave way to more objective reading and studying of history.
The myth of the European Dark Age is no longer accepted by any serious historians. The period wasn't dark, as we are pretty well aware of the events of the time. A more accurate term for this period is Early Middle Ages. And, no, it wasn't some period of savagery, barbarism, and ignorance. It was a period of complex political and cultural changes within Western Europe, as the old guard of Roman hegimony faded and in its place rose new political powers under the various Germanic tribes which had migrated into Western Europe. And so we get the Visigoths in the Iberian Peninsula, the Franks in what is today France and Germany, the Ostrogoths of Northern Africa, and Lombards in Italy. The Muslim conquests of the 7th century brought new changes to Western Europe, as the Visigoths fell, until the time of the Reconquista where Christian kings retook the peninusla, with the kingdoms of Leon, Castile, Aragon, these eventually giving rise to what would eventually become Spain. We have the Frankish Empire in the 8th and 9th centuries establishing the groundwork for what would become the Kingdom of France and later the Holy Roman Empire, as well as the Italian city states. We have the monks of Ireland converting the Picts and Scots to Christianity, we have the Anglo-Saxon invasion of the British Isles and the British Heptarchy which would eventually be unified as the Kingdom of England.
In this period we see the development of culture, language, philosophy, science, engineering, and mathematics. We see the spread of the Gospel into new frontiers, among the Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Frisians, and so on. We see the groundwork for our modern systems of law. The United States itself is an heir of the advances of this period--American jurisprudence has its antecedent in the ideas of common law which were developed in this period, it's how our very justice system works. We have the groundwork which would go on to result in the signing of the Magna Carta in the 13th century, which was the foundation of the idea that people had rights, and was essential to English, and later, British law. Resulting in the creation of Parliament, and, therefore, was one of the major inspirations and foundations for the US Constitution and its Bill of Rights.
There was no European Dark Age, there was just the Early Middle Ages of Western Europe. And it was a deeply complicated, and very interesting, period of history.
-CryptoLUtheran
