THE "DARK" AGES?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 353, 29 March 1946, Page 5

THE "DARK" AGES?

Sir-Mr. Harold Miller has attacked an article published in your paper about the History Serial for the Education sessions. Though I did not write the article, I am largely responsible for the ideas expressed in it. In spite of Mr. Miller’s criticism, I think the works express the fact. Mr, Miller asks was there no art in the Middle Ages? Every century has some gleam of light. But would Mr. Miller compare the stilted coloured lettering of some monkish illuminator with the works of Perugino, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Pinturicchio? Who were the great painters who lived in the 10th, llth, 12th, 13th centuries? Mr. Miller asks if there was no education, Does he ‘Suggest that the Universities were doing a great and progressive work in teaching the Trivium and Quadrivium? Mr. Coulton, in his Mediaeval Panorama, will tell Mr. Miller that there were 50 students at Cambridge. It is generally considered that the only learning lay in the minds of churchmen, that the greater part of the people were entirely illiterate, and that the Church did nothing to cure their ignorance. In fact, the whole policy of the Church was to keep the people in darkness. Had there not been some discontent with that darkness there would have been neither a Renaissance nor a Reformation. I am responsible for the words "about 1400" being used as a starting point for the Renaissance. It still seems. to me a good enough date. Admittedly, Dante comes a century before that time. Every movement has its outriders. Does Mr. Miller deny that there was such a thing as a Renaissance? The giving of names to abstract happenings is awkward, the use of dates still more so. But it is difficult to avoid landmarks in history. Mr. Miller may consider that there was no occasion for a Reformation. Yet it is not easy to put aside the strictures of Erasmus, and many other great men. Finally, let me agree with Mr. Miller that there may be something to be said for living in the dark. But people get tired of living in a blackout, and there is usually trouble when they break out. What happened when the blackout of the Middle Ages lifted appears to me to make the period under discussion so

fascinating.

C. T. A.

TYNDALL

(Well

ington).