The Global Dark and Middle Ages, AD 542–1350

摘要: The millennium from AD 500 to 1500 is suffering an identity crisis. convenient labels of Dark Ages and Middle have come under attack historians seeking unsettle our standard narrative chronology, get at the qualities lived experience during these centuries. Peter Brown led way, smoothing out discontinuities between Age Rome with construct a “Late Antiquity” running roughly 400 900, condemning outer darkness. At other end spectrum, terms late medieval early modern , covering period 1350 1815, are equally problematic because people had no sense themselves as ending or launching “modernity,” least before 1700. In general, questioning cultural periodization entire domain 1700, proposing that it all should simply be seen premodern. Then course there question whether modernity universal, term fundamentally feature North Atlantic societies some time in eighteenth century. When I wear my hat historian, am happy engage debates, but older make earth systems perspective. Here we enter directly into Victor Lieberman’s world “strange parallels.” Just they uncannily support traditional understandings chronology longer antiquity 3000 BC “fall Rome,” boundaries constraints imposed by action climate disease broadly reinforce historical for next millennium. Climate made Brown’s Late Antiquity tough both hemispheres, perhaps “Dark Age.”